Performance Comparison of CP-OFDM and OQAM-OFDM Based WiFi Systems

Abstract: In this contribution, a direct comparison of the Offset-QAM-OFDM (OQAM-OFDM) and the Cyclic Prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM) scheme is given for an 802.11a based system. Therefore, the chosen algorithms and choices of design are described and evaluated as a whole system in terms of bit and frame error rate (BER/FER) performance as well as spectral efficiency and complexity in the presence of multipath propagation for different modulation orders. The results show that the OQAM-OFDM scheme exhibits similar BER and FER performance at a 24% higher spectral efficiency and achievable throughput at the cost of an up to five times increased computational complexity.