BER Analysis and Peak to Average Power Ratio of OFDM Using QPSK

and 16-QAM Digital Modulation Techniques

Y.Ramesh kumar , S.Krishna Santosh , S.A.V.Prasad
(ydramlav,krishnasantosh.sunkara,prasadA2)@gmail.com
Guided by
M.Vinodh Kumar,M.Tech (Communication Engg)

Abstract: Orthogonal Frequency Division utilization. With OFDM, it is possible to have

Multiplexing is a multi carrier communication overlapping sub channels in the frequency domain,
technique which is an advanced version of FDM thus increasing the transmission rate. The attraction
whose draw back for data transmission across a of OFDM is mainly because of its way of handling
channel is bad spectrum usage. This paper here the multipath interference at the receiver. Multipath
overcomes the drawback of FDM and describes phenomenon generates two effects (a) Frequency
the spectral efficiency of communication system selective fading and (b) Inter symbol interference
using OFDM by taking two modulation (ISI).
techniques and comparing their bit error rates
,spectral width and also calculates the peak to Initially the transmission of digital data across the
average power ratio of the OFDM time domain channel gets transmitted as described in the fig 1 .
signal for QPSK and 16-QAM modulation Here a high speed serial stream of data is converted
techniques. to low speed parallel data and then the parallel data
obtained is passed as a input to signal mapper where
Keywords: OFDM , QPSK , 16-QAM , IFFT , BER , output of each parallel line is modulated; here two
Spectral Efficiency , PAPR different schemes of modulation are followed Qpsk
and 16-Qam and the mapped signal is now Passed as
a input to the IFFT where the frequency domain
1. Introduction signal obtained is converted to a time domain signal
using a 64 point IFFT for which the number of
A secured communication with the least distortion parallel lines taken are 52 . Now the time domain
and the least interference is the utmost requirement of signal obtained is given a guard interval spacing
the new-age wireless communication system. Various between the sub carriers which is one fourth of the
methods have been implemented to achieve a near- original time duration here, for this paper we have
secure communication. But taking into consideration taken 16 micro seconds as our guard interval then the
the multipath fading, inter-symbol interference, and time domain signal after insertion of guard interval is
the various fading and distortion factors, this passed through a digital to analog convertor which is
condition is rarely achieved. So, with the available used to convert the signal to a analog form for
channel conditions and provided bandwidth for the transmission along the channel. After this inverse
exchange of information, orthogonal frequency process is carried out at the receiver and the obtained
division multiplexing has been found out to be the signal is converted to its digital form at the receivers
best option available for transmitting the maximum end, after which the original transmitted bits and the
data possible through a communication channel. received bits are compared with one another to find
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) out the error bits such that the bit error rate is
is a technique which provides better spectral calculated, also another parameter to obtain the
efficiency than frequency division multiplexing spectral efficiency is the symbol error rate whose
(FDM) ,while maintaining orthogonal relation values are obtained by taking into consideration the
between carriers , hence traffic is better carried by number of bits per OFDM symbol and cumulative
OFDM than FDM within the same spectrum, due to distributive function also .After obtaining the time
which there is a higher rate of data transmission. In domain form of OFDM signal as shown in fig 3 we
an OFDM scheme, a large number of orthogonal, can calculate the peak power to the average power
overlapping, narrow band sub-carriers are transmitted ratio of the signal which can be obtained by taking
in parallel. These carriers divide the available into account an important parameter that is
transmission bandwidth. The separation of the sub- cumulative distributive function CDF of the time
carriers is such that there is a very compact spectral domain signal obtained after IFFT.
 Fig 1: Block Diagram of OFDM Communication System

a)

b)

Fig 2: Constellation vector diagrams of Fig 3 : Consecutive OFDM sub carriers in

a) Qpsk and b)16-Qam time domain after modulation
 2. OFDM Transmission

Given a finite set of complex numbers Sk that carry

digitally encoded information to be transmitted , we
may use complex Fourier series for this purpose and
transmit the signal

.. (1)
The transmitter performs a Fourier synthesis. In an
ideal transmission channel with perfect
synchronization and no disturbances, the transmit
symbols Sk can be completely recovered at the Fig 4 Qpsk Modulator
receiver by the Fourier analyzer that plays the role of
the detector.one may send K new complex symbols
From the above figure it can be seen that each dibit is
during every time slot of length T by performing
split by a bit splitter after which for Logic 0= -1v
Fourier synthesis for that time slot. At the receiver
and Logic 1 = +1 , two phases are possible at the
the Fourier analysis is done for every time slot. This output of the I balanced modulator (+sinwct and -
method is called Orthogonal Frequency Division
sinwct) and two other phases are possible at the
Multiplexing (OFDM). This system can be
output of the Q balanced modulator(+coswct and -
implemented by the following sections that follow as
coswct).from the linear summer there are four
shown in Fig 1.
different possible phasor outputs given by the
expressions below in the space diagram as well
I. Signal Mapping different phase assignments for the group of dibits
are also shown in the figure 5 below :
Initially a random variable X is taken which takes
into account randomly generated bits from 1 to n
where n is equal to 256 taken for the paper above,
after which the binary bits are converted to decimal
format as shown below

Dec Binary
----- -------------------
13 1 0 1 1
7 1 1 1 0

a) Qpsk Mapping Scheme

Quadrature PSK sometimes called quaternary PSK is

another form of angle-modulated, constant amplitude
digital modulation. With Qpsk four output phases are
possible for a single frequency. Because there are Fig 5 a) Truth table b) Phasor Diagram c)
four phases there must be four different input
Constellation Diagram
conditions. With two bits there are four possible
conditions : 00,01,10,11. Therefore with Qpsk the
binary input data is therefore combined into two The above constellation diagram varies for different
group of bits called dibits. In the modulator each dibit modulation schemes for different SNR values as
code generates four different possible output phases shown in fig 2 above for Qpsk as well for Qam
(+45,+135,-45,-135) modulation schemes
 b) 16-QAM Mapping Scheme

Qam is a form of digital modulation technique where

Digital information is contained in both the phase and
amplitude of the transmitted carrier.16-QAM is an
M-ary system with M=16. The input data is acted on
groups of 4 bits.

Fig 8 Truth table, Phasor diagram, Constellation

diagram

II IFFT , Parallel to Serial Conversion

Fig 6: 16-QAM Modulator Now the obtained frequency domain signal y where
decimal frequencies are allocated to each decimal
The figure above depicts the basic block diagram of value, is converted to a time domain signal by the
16-Qam transmitter. Here the input binary data of inverse fast fourier transform in eq (1) as shown
four bits are divided into four channels I, I, Q, Q. below
the I and Q bits determine the polarity and the I and
the Q determine the magnitude (logic 1 = 0.821v and
logic 0 = 0.22 v).Consequently the 2 to 4 level
convertors generate a 4 level PAM signal. The PAM
signals here modulate the in phase and the quadrature Where W = e j2/N .
carriers in the product modulators from the truth table
below the four outputs possible at each product
modulator. For the I channel the possible outputs are At the transmitter side, an OFDM system treats the
0.821sinwct,-0.821sinwct, 0.221sinwct, -0.221sinwct source symbols as though they are in the frequency-
domain. These symbols are feed to an IFFT block
which brings the signal into the time-domain. If the N
numbers of subcarriers are chosen for the system, the
basic functions for the IFFT are N orthogonal
sinusoids of distinct frequency and IFFT receive N
symbols at a time. Each of N complex valued
input symbols determines both the amplitude and
phase of the sinusoid for that subcarrier. The
output of the IFFT is the summation of all N
Fig 7 : Truth tables for I and Q channel sinusoids and makes up a single OFDM symbol. The
length of the OFDM symbol is NT where T is the
The linear summer now combines the outputs from IFFT input symbol period. In this way, IFFT block
the I and Q channel and produces 16-output provides a simple way to modulate data onto N
conditions necessary for 16-QAM as shown in fig 8 orthogonal subcarriers.
below
Then, the parallel to serial block creates the OFDM The received carrier must be phase and frequency
signal by sequentially outputting the time domain coherent with the transmit reference carrier. The
samples. The channel simulation will allow Qpsk signal is demodulated in the I and Q product
examination of the effects of noise, multipath, and detectors. The output of the product detectors are fed
clipping. By adding random data to the transmitted to the bit combining circuit, where they are converted
signal, simple noise can be simulated. Multipath from parallel I and Q data channels to a single binary
simulation involves adding attenuated and delayed output data stream
copies of the transmitted signal to the original. This
simulates the problem in wireless communication 16-QAM Demodulator
when the signal propagates on many paths. Here the
channel is additive white Gaussian where random 16-Qam Demodulation is generally complex in
noise channel is also made a part of it for simulation nature to implement. In general Qam demodulation
purposes. takes place as shown in fig 10 below

3. OFDM Reception

I. Serial to Parallel Conversion, FFT

Now the obtained OFDM Time domain signal

received is down converted an then passed through
the serial to parallel convertor where First, the
OFDM data are split from a serial stream into parallel
sets. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) converts the
time domain samples back into a frequency domain
representation. The magnitudes of the frequency
components correspond to the original data. Fig 10 : QPSK Receiver Structure
II Signal Demapper Here the input analog form of in phase and
quadrature phase signals at the transmitter are sent
Qpsk Demodulator across the demodulator where the coherent carrier is
made locked with the transmitted analog signal to
The block diagram for Qpsk receiver is shown in the obtain the digital information sent, where the parallel
figure below where the power splitter directs the data obtained from the demodulator scheme is
input Qpsk signal to the I and Q product detectors converted back to its original transmitted high data
and the carrier recovery circuits. The carrier recovery rate serial format using a parallel to serial convertor.
circuits reproduce the original transmit carrier
oscillator signal.
4. BER And PAPR Evaluation
Now as the transmitted and received form of data is
obtained therefore we can obtain the BER by
comparison as described below. For obtaining the bit
error rates for QAM and QPSK modulation, we have
initially taken theoretical bit error rate equations for
different modulations and obtained their band width
and channel capacities to take into account the least
minimum bandwidth channel modulation and a little
higher bandwidth modulation channel as shown
below :

Fig 9: Qpsk Receiver structure

 Table 2.1: Theoretical BER equations
5. Simulation and results
Using MATLAB various simulations were carried
out for obtaining the spectral efficiency in context of
bit error rate, symbol error rate and peak to average
power ratio as shown in fig 11-14 as shown below.
Each symbol of Qpsk conveys 2 bits but that of 16-
Qam conveys 4 bits/symbol therefore in time domain
symbol period is generally twice as long as Qpsk.
here in general randomly 10,000 bits are generated to
detect the channel performance of OFDM in additive
white Gaussian environment. One of the major
problems in OFDM is peak to average power ratio of
encoded signals. Here no coding technique is used to
reduce PAPR since our main aim is to compare the
The table above describes the various modulation performance of modulation technique in severe
techniques and their theoretical bit error rates that environment.
follow of which the extracted data is depicted below:

Table 2.2 Extracted Eb/No and BW values

From the above extracted values we choose Qpsk and Fig 11: Probability of BER vs Eb/No
16-Qam for OFDM modulation and calculated their
spectral efficiency at the expense of BER and PAPR a)

And the simulated result for the above depicted

equations is shown below in fig 11

Where Ber Bit Error Rate can be obtained by the no

of error bits received at the receiver to the total
number of bits transmitted,

For example if Pb is the probability of Bit error rate

then Symbol Error rate can be given by

Ps= 1-(1-Pb)2 . (3)

And finally the peak to average power ratio for all the
subcarriers is calculated by

(4)
b)

Fig 12: Comparison of performance of spectral Fig 14: PAPR CDF for Qpsk and 16-Qam
efficiency for a) 16-QAM b) QPSK
Here PAPR is simulated by taking the number of sub
a) carriers to be 114 and variation is done between -3 to
12 dB for both modulation techniques and from the
above graph we can have the difference values
between the two modulations is same therefore it is
difficult to make command about the improvement of
PAPR but performance of the both can be improved
by using coding technique or various other
techniques like amplitude clipping and noise filtering
technique as well.

6. Conclusion
From the above simulations we can make a
verification that each symbol of Qam conveys 4 bits
b) per symbol which is twice as that of Qpsk and in
terms of context of BER Qpsk yields better
performance than that of 16-Qam QPSK yields better
performance than that of 16-QAM,shown in Fig. 12-
13.Finally it could be concluded that BER
performance of QPSK is better than that of 16-QAM
at the expense of spectral width. Therefore 16-QAM
can carry more traffic than QPSK at the expense of
BER which is obvious in context of digital
modulation technique hence analysis of the paper
yield logical results in context of OFDM. PAPR
solely depends on coding technique not on
modulation technique, which is also verified from the
simulation.

Fig 13 : Symbol error rate probability curves for

a) 16-QAM b) QPSK
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