Improvement on diversity gain with filter bandwidth enlargement in fractional sampling OFDM receiver

A diversity scheme with Fractional Sampling (FS) in an OFDM receiver has been investigated recently. Through FS, it is possible to separate multipath components and obtain diversity gain in OFDM systems. Enlargement of the bandwidth of the total frequency response between transmit and receive baseband filters allows the FS scheme to achieve path diversity. However, the transmit filter has to be designed according to the spectrum mask of the wireless standards such as IEEE802.11a/g to avoid interference to the other communication systems and the frequency response of the composite channel including the transmit and receive filters has often been set to minimal bandwidth to eliminate adjacent channel signals. In order to achieve the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the same filter is commonly used in the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, the trade-off among the SNR deterioration, adjacent channel interference, and the diversity gain due to the enlargement of the bandwidth of the receive filter is investigated. Numerical results from computer simulations indicate that the BER performance with wider bandwidth in the receiver shows better performance than that with the minimal bandwidth for maximizing the SNR in certain conditions.