Location-aware ICI Reduction in MIMO-OFDM Downlinks for High-speed Railway Communication Systems

Abstract: High mobility may destroy the orthogonality of subcarriers in OFDM systems, resulting in inter- carrier interference (ICI), which may greatly reduce the service quantity of high-speed railway (HSR) wireless communications. This paper focuses on ICI mitigation in the HSR downlinks with distributed transmit antennas.For such a system, its key feature is that the ICIs are caused by multiple carrier frequency offsets corresponding to multiple transmit antennas. Meanwhile, the channel of HSR is fast time varying, which is another big challenge in the system design. In order to get a good performance, low complexity real-time ICI reduction is necessary. To this end, we first analyzed the property of the ICI matrix in AWGN and Rician scenarios, respectively. Then, we propose corresponding low complexity ICI reduction methods based on location information. For evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method, the expectation and variance of remaining interference after ICI reduction is analyzed with respect to Rician K-factor. In addition, the service quantity and the bandwidth and computation cost are also discussed. Numerical results are presented to verify our theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of proposed ICI reduction methods. One important observation is that our proposed ICI mitigation method can achieve almost the same service quantity with that obtained on the case without ICI at 300km/h,that is, ICI has been completely eliminated. Numerical results also show that the scenarios with Rician K-factors over 30dB can be considered as AWGN scenarios, which may provide valuable insights on future system designs.