Performance Evaluation of OFDM System: With and Without Reed-Solomon Codes

Abstract

By employing multiple subcarriers within a single channel, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), a numerical multi-carrier variation method, enlarges the idea of sole subcarrier modulation. Instead of using a single subcarrier to transmit a high-rate stream of data, OFDM incorporated with abundant orthogonal subcarriers that are distributed synchronously. With the help of modulation algorithm (BPSK, QPSK), every subcarrier is modulated at a lower symbol rate. Though within identical bandwidths, the combining of several subcarriers permits data speeds comparable to those of traditional single-carrier modulation techniques. Hence, an efficient channel coding is required for improvising error correction capability in OFDM. Reed Solomon (RS) codes, which have strong error-correcting capabilities, were chosen as an effective channel coding scheme. As a result, the goal of this work is to create a channel coding scheme based on RS code that has been suggested to enhance the performance of OFDM. The proposed scheme has been studied over AWGN fading channel for various modulation techniques. The performance evaluation has been done based on BER analysis of proposed scheme with and without RS channel coding. The simulation results clearly depict that, the BER has been improved for the OFDM with RS channel coding.