On the Exploitation of the Redundant Energy in UW-OFDM: LMMSE Versus Sphere Detection

Unique word orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UW-OFDM) inherently introduces a complex number Reed Solomon (RS) code. Originally, the code generator matrix of systematic coded UW-OFDM had been designed rather intuitively by minimizing the mean redundant energy. In this work we justify this approach by applying a cost function that incorporates the overall transceiver chain including a linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) data estimator. In addition to the LMMSE estimator we investigate a nonlinear sphere detection (SD) receiver for both systematic and nonsystematic coded UW-OFDM. We study and interpret the estimators' performance and their diverse ability to exploit the redundant energy.