ICI mitigation for OFDMA uplink systems

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing multiple access (OFDMA) has been considered as a promising multiple access technique in OFDM-based communication systems. In an ideal OFDMA system, no intercarrier interference (ICI) occurs. However, in high-speed mobile environments, the channel may be time-variant during one OFDMA symbol period. In such a condition, the mobility-induced ICI will degrade the system performance seriously. To remove the ICI effect, the zero-forcing (ZF) method is one of the simple techniques. Unfortunately, the direct ZF method needs to invert an N × N ICI matrix, requiring a prohibitively high complexity when N is large. In this paper, we first derive a structured OFDMA uplink signal model consisting of FFTs/IFFTs. Exploring this structure and using Newton's iteration for matrix inversion, we develop a low-complexity ZF method. With our formulation, fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) can be used to reduce the complexity. Thus, the proposed method can reduce the complexity from O(N³) to O(Nlog₂N). Simulations show that the proposed method can have the similar performance to the direct ZF method while requires much lower complexity.