Multicarrier Chirp-Division Multiplexing for Wireless Communications

Abstract

We propose a multicarrier chirp-division multiplexing (MCDM) system in which orthogonal chirp waveforms are utilized as frequency subcarriers. Orthogonal characteristics of chirp subcarriers are analyzed in respect to cross-correlation coefficients among subcarriers. Moreover, orthogonal chirp transform (OCT) is developed to implement MCDM systems. In addition, we design a low complexity receiver, including packet synchronization, carrier frequency offset compensation, channel estimation, and symbol detection. Proposed MCDM systems have both advantages of chirp waveforms and multicarrier architectures. Computational complexity of our proposed detector is discussed in detail. The bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the MCDM system is evaluated in simulations and indoor radio frequency (RF) experiments. We have demonstrated effectiveness of MCDM systems both in simulation and experimental results, comparing to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Moreover, MCDM can be further applied to higher order modulations for enabling higher data rates for RF wireless communications.