Signal Processing in OFDM
The telecommunications industry faces the problem of providing telephone services to rural areas, where the customer base is small, but the cost of installing a wired phone network is very high. One method of reducing the high infrastructure cost of a wired system is to use a fixed wireless radio network. The problem with this is that for rural and urban areas, large cell sizes are required to get sufficient coverage. This presents extra problems as there are long delay times in multi-path signal propagation.
Currently Global System for Mobile telecommunications (GSM) technology is being applied to fixed wireless phone systems. However, GSM uses time division multiple access (TDMA), which has a high symbol rate leading to problems with multi-path causing inter-symbol interference.
OFDM/COFDM allows many users to transmit in an allocated band, by subdividing the available bandwidth into many narrow bandwidth carriers. Each user is allocated several carriers in which to transmit their data. The transmission is generated in such a way that the carriers used are orthogonal to one another, thus allowing them to be packed together much closer than standard frequency division multiplexing (FDM). This leads to OFDM/COFDM providing a high spectral efficiency. 
Wireless communications is an emerging field, which has seen enormous growth in the last several years. The huge uptake rate of mobile phone technology, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and the exponential growth of the Internet have resulted in an increased demand for new methods of obtaining high capacity wireless networks.
Most WLAN systems currently use the IEEE802.11b standard, which provides a maximum data rate of 11 Mbps. Newer WLAN standards such as IEEE802.11a and HiperLAN2 are based on OFDM technology and provide a much higher data rate of 54 Mbps. However systems of the near future will require WLANs with data rates of greater than 100 Mbps, and so there is a need to further improve the spectral efficiency and data capacity of OFDM systems in WLAN applications.
For cellular mobile applications, we will see in the near future a complete convergence of mobile phone technology, computing, Internet access, and potentially many multimedia applications such as video and high quality audio. In fact, some may argue that this convergence has already largely occurred, with the advent of being able to send and receive data using a notebook computer and a mobile phone. Although this is possible with current 2G (2nd Generation) Mobile phones, the data rates provided are very low (9.6 kbps – 14.4 kbps) and the cost is high.
The goal of third and fourth generation mobile networks is to provide users with a high data rate, and to provide a wider range of services, such as voice communications, videophones, and high speed Internet access. The higher data rate of future mobile networks will be achieved by increasing the amount of spectrum allocated to the service and by improvements in the spectral efficiency. OFDM is a potential candidate for the physical layer of fourth generation mobile systems. Much research is going on techniques for improving the spectral efficiency of OFDM systems applied in WLAN and mobile networks.
OFDM for two-way communications or for multi-user applications include wireless modems, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN's), Wireless Local Loop (WLL), mobile phones, and mobile high speed internet.