Orthogonal wavelet division multiplex: An alternative to OFDM

Over the past three decades, the scientific and industrial communities have injected considerable resources into perfecting Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) - the driving technology behind many applications used today (such as IEEE 802.11g, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), and Digital Terrestrial Television). In 1997, OFDM was officially sanctioned for use in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) EN 300 744 standard known as Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T). As OFDM is such a popular technology, there has been limited research over the years into alternatives. This paper will propose a novel approach to transmit parallel information through a terrestrial channel that could render it a more flexible alternative to OFDM in the future. Investigations have shown that this technique could provide a highly flexible, channel optimized modulation technique based on time-frequency multiplexing and this paper presents the preliminary phase of investigations into this new technique.