Evaluation of the polar coded OFDM system

Abstract

The orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) which has underlying sensing and spectrum shaping capabilities, is indeed well suited to fulfill the requirements of next generation communications. In a multipath environment, bit error rate (BER) is dominated by few subcarriers with small amplitudes because of the deep fades. This requires employing forward error correction (FEC) method on the data transferred in order to compensate for the burst errors that occur in physical channel. To this end, we adopt polar codes which are the latest breakthrough in coding theory. We propose polar coded OFDM (PCOFDM) system to improve the bit error rate (BER) of OFDM. The simulation results on an AWGN channel using binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) show that PCOFDM system exhibits better bit error rate (BER) performance than the low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded OFDM (LDPC-COFDM) system under similar channel conditions.