Multiplierless filtered-OFDM transmitter for narrow-band IoT devices

Abstract

In cyclic-prefix orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) based radio access, the coexistence of different technologies without precise time-frequency synchronization is limited due to high out-of-band emissions. Therefore, spectrum enhancement techniques play a key role to relax the synchronization and power control requirements. This allows higher degree of opportunistic spectrum use with minimized interference. In addition, all transmitting devices have to fulfill specific transmitted signal quality requirements, including the maximum out-of-band radiated signal power. With OFDM based radio access, some additional signal processing for improved spectrum containment is commonly needed to achieve these requirements. Filtering and time-domain windowing are two fundamentally different approaches for spectrum enhancement. Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) provides better spectrum localization than the timewindowing schemes (such as windowed overlap-add, WOLA), with the cost of higher complexity. This paper introduces lowcomplexity solutions for spectrally enhanced narrow-band OFDM transmitters based on the use of a look-up tables (LUTs). The proposed LUT approach, requiring only memory units and a low number of additions, allows to avoid all computationally expensive operations in on-line transmitter processing, as it builds the transmitted signal by summing the stored partial waveforms optimized off-line. In certain cases, completely multiplication and summation free designs are possible. The transmitters of narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT) devices are natural applications for the proposed LUT approach, as they require additional digital baseband signal processing to reach the emission requirements. It is shown that the proposed LUT schemes can provide signicant savings in real-time computations of NB-IoT devices, while fulfilling the 3GPP requirements.