8.6 ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)

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8.6 ORTHOGONAL FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (OFDM)

In CDMA systems, a single carrier is used to spread the spectrum. In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the transmission by individual terminals is split over a number of carriers. It is closer to frequency hopping except that the transmission is done on the designated channels simultaneously.

The advantage of this scheme is that because multiple carriers are used to carry the data, multipath fading is less compared to CDMA. OFDM is considered a big competitor to CDMA in wireless networks, though OFDM systems are yet to be widely deployed.

In OFDM, the data is transmitted simultaneously on a number of carriers. This technique is used to overcome multipath fading. OFDM is used in wireless local area networks.

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