Future multimedia services will require the transmission of very high data rates over broad-band radio channels. In order to provide these services to mobile users, an appropriate transmission technique has to cope with frequency-selective and time-variant radio channels. The computation complexity for an equalizer increases in a frequency-selective radio channel for high data rate applications. Furthermore, the overhead for channel estimation procedures increases in time-variant channels. To overcome these drawbacks orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered for broadband applications in many publications. The objective of this paper is to describe the large potential, the flexibility and adaptivity of the OFDM transmission technique in frequency-selective and time variant radio channels. Several technical aspects of OFDM transmission systems are discussed, especially the topics of differential modulation for which we compare different demodulation methods and channel coding with soft decision decoding. For higher level differential modulation, multilevel coding is taken into consideration.

The multilevel modulation techniques of 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-differential amplitude and phase-shift keying (DAPSK) have been proposed in combination with the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme for digital terrestrial video broadcasting (DTVB). With this system a data rate of 34 Mb/s can be transmitted over an 8-MHz radio channel. A comparison of these modulation methods in the uncoded case has been presented by Engels and Rohling (see European Trans. Telecommun., vol.6, p.633-40, 1995). The channel coding scheme proposed for DTVB by Schafer (see Proc. Int. Broadcasting Convention, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, p.79-84, 1995) consists of an inner convolutional code concatenated with an outer Reed-Solomon (RS) code. In this paper the performance of the convolutional codes is analyzed for the two modulation techniques. This analysis includes soft decision Viterbi (1971) decoding of the convolutional code. For soft decision decoding of DAPSK modulated signals a new metric is developed.