UC San Diego

In orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, the total spectral resource is partitioned into multiple orthogonal subcarriers. These subcarriers are assigned to different users for simultaneous transmission in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). In an unsynchronized OFDMA uplink, each user has a different carrier frequency offset (CFO) relative to the common uplink receiver, which results in the loss of orthogonality, among subcarriers and thereby multiple access interference. Hence, OFDMA is very sensitive to frequency synchronization errors. In this paper, we construct the received signals in frequency domain that would have been received if all users were frequency synchronized. A generalized OFDMA framework for arbitrary subcarrier assignments is proposed. The interference in the generalized OFDMA uplink due to frequency synchronization errors is characterized in a multiuser signal model. Least squares and minimum mean square error criteria are proposed to construct the orthogonal spectral signals from one OFDMA block contaminate with interference that was caused by the CFOs of multiple users. For OFDMA with a large number of subcarriers, a low-complexity implementation of the proposed algorithms is developed based on a banded matrix approximation. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed algorithms improve the system performance significantly and are computationally affordable using the banded system implementation.