Low CP Overhead Waveform Design for Multi-Path Channels with Timing Synchronization Error

In classical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, inserting the cyclic prefix (CP) is necessary before each symbol to overcome the multi-path effect, which, however, occupies numerous time-frequency radio resources, resulting in hampered spectrum efficiency. To address this issue, in this paper, symbol repetition aware OFDM (SR-OFDM) is developed to lower the overhead of CP. In the proposed SR-OFDM, multiple symbols share the same CP with which we examine that the multi-path channels can also be overcome by a simple single-tap equalization without causing any interference. Moreover, after the discrete Fourier transform at the receiver, different symbols are proved to be separated in the time domain, which is beneficial for lowering the demodulation complexity. Furthermore, it is revealed that the above conclusions still hold even under timing synchronization errors, which makes the proposed SR-OFDM favorable in real systems. Extensive simulations validate the efficacy of our proposed SR-OFDM system under the multi-path channels with or without timing synchronization errors.