The impact of impulse postfix length on the BER performance of IP‐OFDM systems

The impulse postfix OFDM (IP‐OFDM) system exploits the IP, which consists of a high power impulse sample and several zero samples at the end of a zero padded‐OFDM symbol block, to estimate channel impulse response (CIR) in time domain. In this paper, the impact of IP length on the BER performance of the IP‐OFDM system is analyzed. According to the analytic results, the BER performance can be significantly degraded with both a shorter length of IP as well as a longer length of IP than that of the CIR. Thus, an adaptive IP scheme, which adjusts the length of IP adaptively depending on the length of CIR, is proposed to enhance the BER performance of IP‐OFDM systems and its effectiveness is demonstrated by computer simulations. The BER performance of the IP‐OFDM systems with the proposed adaptive scheme is compared with that of the conventional IP‐OFDM system over various modulation schemes. Simulation results show that the IP‐OFDM with the proposed scheme can achieve about 2 dB performance enhancement compared with that of conventional systems at BER=10^?2. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.