Performance Analysis of OFDM in Combating Multipath Fading

Abstract

Mobile Communication system has been on high rampage for high data transmission over wireless medium with various challenges caused by the transmission Channel. OFDM is been discovered in recent years to deal with this problems because of its ability to elegantly cope with multipath interference. This paper investigates the performance of different modulation schemes using M-ary Phase Shift Keying (M-PSK) and M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM) in information transmission with OFDM technique over Ideal channel AWGN and worst channel Rayleigh Fading channel in terms of Bits Error Rate (BER). Analysis was made for different types of modulation schemes BPSK, QPSK, 4-QAM and 16-QAM gray coded bit mapping. Also, a feasibility of OFDM been used to combat multipath fading was analyzed with comparison between a single carrier technique and OFDM multicarrier technique. Variation between SNR results with respect to BER is plotted to show the trade off differences between the modulation schemes with the result showing that OFDM allows data transmission with minimal error over fading channel than a Single Carrier.