Multi‐phase initial ranging process for OFDMA systems: improved dynamic threshold‐based multi‐user detection approach

Initial ranging (IR) is a process of performing power adjustment, timing offset estimation, and synchronisation between the base station (BS) and all users. It plays a vital role in mobile WiMAX standard, which establishes a communication link between BS and ranging subscriber stations (RSSs). Since RSS is located far away from the BS and uplink signal is corrupted by noise, the IR process becomes inferior. Thus, the authors propose an improved dynamic threshold‐based IR method comprising three phases: (i) code detection phase, (ii) filtering phase, and (iii) parameter estimation phase. In the first two phases, the received signal is pre‐processed to eliminate noise and unselected codes from the codeset by employing adaptive filter and weight‐based code detection method. Then, the noise‐free signal is considered for the final phase, which improves accuracy. The iterative expectation maximisation algorithm is involved in the estimation of channel coefficient and timing offset. All possible active paths are detected by setting a dynamic threshold value for each channel by the enhanced dynamic threshold method. For all active channels, round trip delay, and power level are estimated by considering particular channel coefficient and timing offset. Extensive simulation of proposed work shows considerable improvements in performance.