A spectral approach to inter-carrier interference mitigation in OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose a new method for inter-carrier interference (ICI) mitigation in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed approach views the signal reconstruction problem at the receiver end as an integer least squares (ILS) problem, and uses a recently developed spectral approach called sequential probabilistic ILS (SPILS) to solve it. The proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches while having the same computational complexity. In addition, we present a novel extension to the SPILS scheme that allows the generation of soft decisions (for communication systems which use soft-decision decoding). The use of soft-decision decoding (naturally) brings significant improvement in the detection reliability, and we show that the proposed method again outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. To better address the tradeoff between performance and complexity, we first suggest a novel method to reduce the number of matrix inversions required and hence, to reduce the implementation complexity without any degradation in performance. We also introduce a novel low complexity scheme termed Quick SPILS (QSPILS) in which we lose a little in detection reliability, but significantly reduce the implementation complexity.