Analysis of cyclic prefix length effect on ISI limitation in OFDM system over a Rayleigh-fading multipath

Abstract

In this work, the influence of the cyclic prefix on the performance of the OFDM system is studied. We worked out an OFDM transceiver using a 16 QAM modulation scheme, a comparison of the BER for various lengths of the cyclic prefix has been achieved, and the influence of the noise introduced in the channel has been highlighted, for both a Gaussian and Rayleigh noise. The simulation was carried out on MATLAB where the curves of the BER for various lengths of the cyclic prefix are given and compared. We also adopted as a metric the QAM constellation to show the dispersion of the carriers as a consequence of the transmission channel, the mitigation of this effect by the CP is noticeable.