Performance Evaluation and Comparison Study of OFDM in AWGN and Colored Noise Environment

In modern wireless communication system Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) gathers interest by reason of its numerous advantages like high spectrum efficiency, immunity against Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), impulsive noise, multi-path fading and high bit rate capacity etc. The AWGN channel is theoretical, simple, and is generally considered as the starting point to develop the basic system for the performance evaluation purpose. In practical situations, however, noise is not AWGN and can rather be better approximated as colored noise. Thus it becomes important to evaluate the performance of communication systems under the colored noise environment and compare the same with the case when noise is AWGN. This is the objective of this work, and, is carried out in this paper. MATLAB R2014 is used for performance evaluation and comparison study. For lower values of SNRs, \({\mathrm{SNR}} \le 0\) dB, \({\mathrm{BER_{Colored}}} 0) is observed, however, for SNR > 0 dB, the \({\mathrm{BER_{Colored}}}\) is found to be almost similar to \({\mathrm{BER_{AWGN}}}\) leading to small BDF. This study is important in view of analysing the OFDM system performance in colored noise and comparing it with the case when channel is theoretical, that is, AWGN.