Performance of modified and low complexity pulse shaping filters for IEEE 802.11 OFDM transmission

The most commonly used multicarrier modulation method in 802.11 wireless communication systems is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). However, OFDM is easily affected by Inter Symbol Interference (ISI). In this paper, different pulse shaping filters are employed in the OFDM system and three new filters are presented to further reduce ISI effects. The first one is a Modified Parametric Exponential Pulse (MPEXP) filter which employs a different transfer function that is implemented at the transmitter side. The second one is a Better Than Modified Flipped Exponential Pulse (BTMFEXP) filter which is derived by modifying the transfer function of Modified Flipped Exponential Pulse (MFEXP). The third one is a hybrid of BTMFEXP and MPEXP (HBTMFPEXP). Lastly, low complexity forms of the MFEXP and BTMFEXP, derived from Taylor Series, are implemented. The OFDM system was tested with the existing and proposed pulses over AWGN and Fading channels. The proposed filters show better Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. Under a high ISI level, BTMFEXP and HBTMFPEXP showed a gain of 0.23 and 0.57 dB respectively over MFEXP with AWGN channel. With a fading channel at high ISI level, the proposed BTMFEXP and HBTMFPEXP demonstrated a gain of 2.33 and 5.33 dB respectively over MFEXP.