“Simulation of OFDM Signalling”

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to provide Matlab code to simulate the basic processing involved in the generation and reception of an OFDM signal in a physical channel and to provide a description of each of the steps involved. This report investigates the effectiveness of Orthogonal Frequency Division multiplexing (OFDM) as a modulation technique for wireless radio applications. The main aim was to access the suitability of OFDM as a modulation technique for a fixed wireless phone system for rural areas. However, its suitability for more general wireless applications is also accessed. The IEEE standardization group decided to select OFDM as the basis for their new 5-GHz standard, targeting a range of data stream from 6 up to 54 Mbps. This new standard is the first one to use OFDM in packet-based communications, while the use of OFDM until now was limited to continuous transmission systems. In this project, transmitter and receiver were simulated according to the parameters established by the standard, to evaluate the performance and different possibilities in the implementation.