Multicarrier modulation for HF communications

Abstract

High-frequency (HF) communications can be flexibly realized using multicarrier modulation techniques. This paper compares the performance of three widely utilized MCM techniques, namely, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), filter bank multicarrier/offset-QAM (FBMC/OQAM), and filtered multitone (FMT) in HF communications. The performance of these systems is simulated using commonly adopted HF-channel models. It is shown that the simulated uncoded bit-error rate of OFDM is slightly better than that of FBMC/OQAM and FMT. However, with pilot based channel estimation FMT outperforms FBMC/OQAM and OFDM systems in achievable coded frame error rate in case of selective channel models.