A new reduced-complexity detection scheme for zero-padded OFDM transmissions

Recently, zero-padding orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ZP-OFDM) has been proposed as an alternative solution to the traditional cyclic prefix (CP)-OFDM, to ensure symbol recovery regardless of channels nulls. Various ZP-OFDM receivers have been proposed in the literature, trading off performance with complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel low-complexity (LC) receiver for ZP-OFDM transmissions and derive an upper bound on the bit error rate (BER) performance of the LC-ZP-OFDM receiver. We further demonstrate that the LC-ZP-OFDM receiver brings a significant complexity reduction in the receiver design, while outperforming conventional minimum mean-square error (MMSE)-ZP-OFDM, supported by simulation results. A modified (M)-ZP-OFDM receiver, which requires the channel state information (CSI) knowledge at the transmitter side, is presented. We show that the M-ZP-OFDM receiver outperforms the conventional MMSE-ZP-OFDM when either perfect or partial CSI (i.e., limited CSI) is available at the transmitter side.