Suppressing Doppler-induced intercarrier interference with multiple receiving antennas

In high-mobility OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) systems, Doppler distortions cause inter-carrier interference (ICI) that may degrade the system performance severely. Solutions to combat these distortions usually result in an extensive amount of signal processing at the receiver, where the favourable properties of the OFDM signal structure in frequency domain are no longer exploited. For a multi-antenna receiver, the author proposes to use an optimum combining approach, which enables to suppress the ICI while maintaining a subcarrierwise equalization. It is shown that the approach yields a convenient performance, rendering it interesting for practical applications. Simulative performance evaluation reveal substantial gains compared to a conventional MRC (maximum combiner ratio) receiver that totally ignores the ICI. As the solution maintains a subcarrier-wise signal processing, its complexity demands are low .