Abstract

We investigate the performance of LDPC codes with

BDPSK-OFDM modulation over the AWGN channel with
unknown carrier phase. The proposed A-TSOI-LLR metric
is performing better and more tolerant to SNR estimation
error than the Gaussian metric.
I. INTRODUCTION
Optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) has attracted much interest in the fiber-optic
research community [1]. However, OFDM is prone to
phase noise, and the knowledge of exact carrier phase is
usually not available. Differential encoding has been used
in single carrier systems to offer a simple solution by
using the leading signal as a phase reference. In optical
OFDM systems, the carrier phase doesnt vary much
across different subcarriers. In this paper, differential
encoding is applied across the frequency domain of each
OFDM symbol to combat the phase noise. Low-density
parity-check (LDPC) codes [2], which achieves close to
Shannon limit performance [3], is also employed here.
In this paper we propose an LDPC coded BDPSK-
OFDM scheme and derive a new log-likelihood ratio
(LLR) metric based on two-symbol-interval observations
with consideration of unknown carrier phase, similar to
[4] for single carrier. The performance is evaluated in
AWGN channel with unknown carrier phase. As far as
we know, there is no analytical work on the LLR metrics
for coded-OFDM systems with carrier phase noise.
II. LLR METRIC
A. System Model
The system model of LDPC coded BDPSK-OFDM is
shown in Fig. 1. A binary message sequence
m=[m
1
,m
2
m
K
] is first encoded by an LDPC encoder to
a code word c=[c
1
,c
2
c
N
], with a code rate equal to K/N.
The code word is modulated with BDPSK to become
s=[s
1
,s
2
s
N
], where s
k
= E
s
1/2
exp(j
k
), with E
s
as the
energy of the signal and {0, }
k
. The information of
the code bit is carried in the phase difference of two
consecutive signals s
k
and s
k-1
:
k
=
k-1
+
k
, where
k
is
equal to 0 if c
k
=0 and otherwise. Differential encoding
is realized across subcarriers within one OFDM symbol.
s is then zero-padded to a length of N
FFT
, which
constitutes the subcarriers of one OFDM symbol. After
taking IFFT and P/S, we transmit the signal over an
AWGN channel with unknown carrier phase. The

This work was supported by A*STAR SERC PSF 092 101 0054
received signal after FFT is modeled as:
, 1... , 1...
i
j
ik ik ik f
r t e n i N k N

= + = = (1)
where r
ik
, t
ik
, n
ik
and
i
are the frequency domain received
signal, transmitted signal, additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN), and unknown carrier phase at time instant i,
respectively. i and k stand for the time and frequency
subscripts. Although Eq. 1 is derived in AWGN channel,
it is also applicable to optical channel assuming the
channel distortion is removed first.
At the receiver, the LLR metric is calculated based on
the received signal and passed to the iterative LDPC
decoder, where the estimated message m is obtained.
LDPC
encoder
m
1
LDPC
encoder
m
Nf

BDPSK
Modulator
BDPSK
Modulator
I
F
F
T
P
/
S
S
/
P
n
e
j
F
F
T
Log-likelihood
Metric Calculator
Log-likelihood
Metric Calculator
LDPC
decoder
LDPC
decoder
m
1
m
Nf
Channel

Fig. 1. LDPC coded BDPSK-OFDM system model (Nf: number of
frames, n: AWGN noise, : unknown carrier phase).
B. LLR Metrics
Because individual LDPC encoder/decoder is used for
different subscript i, we can drop this subscript when
deriving the LLR metrics for decoder. The information of
code bit c
k
is contained in the two received signals r
k
and
r
k-1
with consecutive frequency domain subscripts.
According to [4], the LLR metric L(k) is defined as:

1
1
( 0 | , )
( ) ln
( 1| , )
k k k
k k k
p c r r
L k
p c r r

=
=
=
(2)
The event of {c
k
=l} is equivalent to the event of
{
k
=l}, for l=0,1. Because the priori probabilities of c
k

are equal, we can rewrite (2) as:

1
1
( , | 0)
( ) ln
( , | )
k k k
k k k
p r r
L k
p r r

=
=
=
(3)
After a series of simplification which can be found in
[4], we get the expression of the likelihood function
conditioned on as:

| 1
1/ 2
1
0
1
( , | , )
2
cosh ( 1)
cos( ( ( 1) ) )
l k k
l s
k k
l
k k
P p r r l
E
C r r
N
r r

= =

= +

(4)
Log-likelihood Metric for LDPC coded
BDPSK-OFDM Transmission
Shengjiao Cao
1
, Pooi-Yuen Kam
1
, and Changyuan Yu
1,2

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117576, Singapore
2 A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, 138632, Singapore
164
2012 17
th
Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC 2012) Technical Digest
July 2012, Busan, Korea
978-1-4673-0978-3/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE
4B3-4

We assume that is a random variable uniformly
distributed in the interval [-,). To remove the
dependence on , we average the likelihood function over
all possible values of .

|
( )
l l
P P p d

(5)
After substituting Eq. 4 into Eq. 5, we obtain:

1/ 2
0 1
0
2
( 1)
l s
l k k
E
P CI r r
N


= +



(6)
where
0
1
( ) exp( Re[ ])
2
j
I x xe d

is the
zeroth-order modified Bessel function. The result metric
is called Averaged-Two-Symbol-Observation-Interval
LLR (A-TSOI-LLR):

1/ 2
0 1
0
1/ 2
0 1
0
2
( ) ln
2
s
k k
s
k k
E
I r r
N
L k
E
I r r
N

+



=

(7)
The Gaussian Metric (GM) [5] is used for comparison:
L(k)=2E
s
Re[r
k
r
*
k-1
]/
2
, where
2
=E
s
N
0
+(N
0
/2)
2
.
5 5.5 6 6.5 7
-5
-4.5
-4
-3.5
-3
-2.5
-2
-1.5
E
b
/N
0
(dB)
l
o
g

(
B
E
R
)


GM
A-TSOI-LLR

Fig. 2. BER performance of (204,102) LDPC codes over noncoherent
AWGN channel.
III. SIMULATION RESULT
In the simulation, Rate-half, regular (204,102) binary
LDPC codes [6] is used with IDFT/DFT size of 256. The
noise variance is assumed to be known at the receiver
side. In the first case, is assumed to be constant over
different subcarriers in one symbol. Fig. 2 shows the
BER performance of GM and A-TSOI-LLR metrics
against SNR per information bit, E
b
/N
0
, where E
b
is the
energy per information bit. The performance gain of A-
TSOI-LLR over GM is about 0.12 dB at BER of 10
-4
. In
the second case, we investigate the performance of the
metrics in the presence of phase noise. The unknown
carrier phase is modeled as a random-walk process:
k
=
k-
1
+n
k
, where {n
k
} is iid Gaussian random variables with
zero mean and variance
2
. In Fig. 3, we plot the BER
curve in the presence of phase noise where
2
=510
-4
.
This
2
value corresponds to a ~800-kHz laser linewidth
(
2
=2T
s
) in 10-Gsample/s OFDM system. A-TSOI-
LLR requires 0.09-dB less SNR compared to GM at BER
of 10
-3
. Fig. 4 shows the effect of an estimation error in
SNR on the performance with time-invariant unknown
carrier phase at 6-dB SNR. Both metrics are more
tolerant to SNR over-estimation than under-estimation.
The tolerable SNR under-estimation value is -2.7 dB for
A-TSOI-LLR and -1.7 dB for GM at two-times BER
degradation (a difference of 0.3 in y axis).
5 5.5 6 6.5 7
-3.5
-3
-2.5
-2
-1.5
-1
E
b
/N
0
(dB)
l
o
g

(
B
E
R
)


GM
A-TSOI-LLR

Fig. 3. BER performance of (204,102) LDPC codes over noncoherent
AWGN channel with phase noise:
2
=510
-4
.
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3
-3.4
-3.2
-3
-2.8
-2.6
-2.4
-2.2
-2
-1.8


SNR Estimation Error (dB)
l
o
g

(
B
E
R
)
GM
A-TSOI=LLR

Fig. 4. BER performance of (204,102) LDPC codes over noncoherent
AWGN channel at Eb/N0=6 dB, subjected to SNR estimation error.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we propose a log-likelihood metric based
on two-symbol-interval observations with consideration
of unknown carrier phase for LDPC coded BDPSK-
OFDM. The A-TSOI-LLR metric is performing better
compared to GM metric, with larger tolerance to SNR
under-estimation error.
REFERENCES
[1] W. Shieh, and et al, Coherent optical OFDM: theory and
design, Opt. Expr., vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 841-859, 2008.
[2] R.G. Gallager, Low-density Parity-check Codes,
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1963.
[3] S. Chung, and et al, "On the design of low-density parity-
check codes within 0.0045 dB of the Shannon limit", IEEE
Comm. Lett., vol. 5, no. 2, 2001.
[4] E. Mo, P.Y. Kam, Log-likelihood metrics based on two-
symbol-interval observations for LDPC codes with
BDPSK transmission, in Proc. Of Vehicular Tech. Conf.
08.
[5] H. Tatsunami, and et al, On the performance of LDPC
codes with differential detection over Rayleigh fading
channels, in Proc. Of Vehicular Tech. Conf. 06.
[6] D. MacKay's Database, [Online]. Available: http://
www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/codes/data.html.
165
2012 17
th
Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC 2012) Technical Digest
July 2012, Busan, Korea
978-1-4673-0978-3/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE