The Third International Conference on Digital Telecommunications
A frequency domain FIR filter implementation method for 3G communication
systems
Maroun Ojail
CEA, LIST
Embedded Computing Laboratory
P.O. Box 94, Gif-sur-Yvette, F-91191 France
maroun.ojail@cea.fr
Raphael David
CEA, LIST
Embedded Computing Laboratory
P.O. Box 94 , Gif-sur-Yvette, F-91191 France
raphael.david@cea.fr
Abstract
Wireless communications have been evolving in the past
years in a fast way that led to the apparition of numer-
ous standards like UMTS (3G), IEEE 802.11 (WLAN) and
DVB-H. New mobile equipments should support multiple
standards in order to offer the most complete set of applica-
tions to the user like telephony, mobile internet and mobile
television. This paper presents a new method of implement-
ing a high performance Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter
in the frequency domain that is suitable for third generation
communication systems. The method discussed is also an
enabler for the implementation of low cost modules capable
of performing filtering and fast Fourier transforms for use
with the wide variety of the wireless communication stan-
dards available nowadays.
1. Introduction
In the past years, the evolutions of the telecommunica-
tion sector were concentrated on the improvement of wire-
less communications and their quality of service to enable
them to support a multi-standard function with both high
performance and reduced cost. These evolutions led to the
definition of multiple access schemes and consequently to
the apparition of numerous telecommunication standards
like GPRS, UMTS, IEEE 802.11 and DVB-H. Extracting
similarities between multiple standards is a must in order
for a system to take advantage of the multiplicity of radio
technologies available nowadays, and that without having
978-0-7695-3188-5/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICDT.2008.9
Stephane Chevobbe
CEA, LIST
Embedded Computing Laboratory
P.O. Box 94, Gif-sur-Yvette, F-91191 France
stephane.chevobbe@cea.fr
Didier Demigny
IRISA/ENSSAT
Team R2D2
6 rue de Kerampont, 22300 Lannion France
didier.demigny@univ-rennes1.fr
to implement in hardware all the functions needed by these
different technologies.
Main functions in wireless communications are Finite
Impulse Response (FIR) Filters and Fast Fourier Trans-
forms (FFT). FIR filters are very important blocks in the
Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) tech-
nique on which the UMTS standard is based [6]. Direct
and inverse FFT are, on the other hand, essential modules
in standards based on the Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) technique, like WLAN and DVB-
H [9]. Thus, in this paper we present a new method of
implementing the FIR filter in the frequency domain. This
method enables the realization of a minimal size module ca-
pable of executing both the FIR and the FFT functions and
increases the similarities between WCDMA and OFDM
based communication systems.
A 64-tap filter (or sometimes less) is usually sufficient to
meet the minimum requirements of WCDMA based com-
munication standards [2]. Classic frequency domain imple-
mentation is normally more computationally complex than
a time domain implementation for small filter lengths. Con-
sequently, employing a FIR filter in the frequency domain
for wireless communication standards was not possible until
now. In this study we show that we can overcome this draw-
back by combining the inphase (I) and the quadrature phase
(Q) paths in WCDMA transmission and reception chains
before passing them through the FIR filter. We then show
that by choosing frequency domain filter coefficients as the
samples of the ideal frequency transfer function, we can
boost the performances of such a filter mainly in terms of
immunity against intersymbol interference.
1
 The structure of this paper is as follows: we begin in
section 2 by presenting background information on the im-
portance of FIR filters in WCDMA based communication
systems. In section 3 we discuss the choices we made that
enabled the feasibility of a frequency domain FIR filter for
the UMTS standard in terms of computational complexity
and performances of the filtering. Section 4 exposes the
methodology we used to evaluate the performances of the
proposed frequency domain filter. In section 5 we compare
these performances against a classical time domain imple-
mentation in terms of intersymbol interference measured by
error vector magnitude and peak distortion. A comparison
between the two filters on their immunity against additive
white Gaussian noise is also conducted. We finally con-
clude by summarizing the main innovations of our contri-
bution and presenting our future work.
2 Background
Third Generation 3G communication systems use
WCDMA technique to transmit and receive data. The spec-
trum of a signal of the type used in WCDMA has adjacent
channel sidelobes. These sidelobes introduce interference
into users of the adjacent frequencies who could be the same
operator or could be other operators. That’s why filtering
in the transmitter should be used to overcome the effect of
the adjacent channel sidelobes. Numerous considerations
discussed in [8] and throughout this paper led to the use
of a FIR filter in the WCDMA transmitter, together with a
matched filter in the receiver in a way to get a Nyquist filter
as the combined filter response.
In the time domain, the FIR operation is achieved by
convolution. Converting to the frequency domain, a con-
volution is equivalent to a simple multiplication. Hence we
can state that F IR [x(t)] = x(t) ⊗ h(t) = F −1 [H.F(x)]
where H is the Fourier transform of filter coefficients h(t),
(⊗) is the convolution product, (.) is the dot product and
F(x) is the Fast Fourier transform of discrete input x(t).
FIR filters in the transmission and reception chains are
used to implement root raised cosine (RRC) filters of which
the combined transfer function results in a raised cosine fil-
ter (a type of Nyquist filter). The time domain representa-
tion for the RRC filter is [4]

  

sin (1 − α)π Tt + 4α Tt cos (1 + α)π Tt
h(t) =  t   2  (1)
π T 1 − 4α Tt
where
1 1
T = = ≈ 0.260µs for WCDMA.
chip rate 3.84 × 106
Note that implementing FIR filters by FFT is not by it-
self an innovative idea. In fact, many researches have pro-
posed FIR filters in the frequency domain in the past two
2
decades [3, 1, 10]. But, to our knowledge, no previous work
proposed a frequency-domain FIR filter for the UMTS stan-
dard, mainly because of computational complexity prob-
lems as discussed in the introduction.
3 Proposed frequency domain FIR filter
In this section we show that implementing the FIR filter
in the frequency domain for the UMTS standard is actually
feasible and even requires less computational complexity
than a time domain realization. We also expose a new and
effective method to choose the best filter coefficients for the
UMTS standard in order to increase performance of FIR
filtering, namely its immunity against intersymbol interfer-
ence.
3.1 Analysis of computational complexi-
ties
To process one sample in the time domain, a symmet-
ric FIR filter needs N2 multiplications and N − 1 additions.
This means that a FIR filter executes 0.5(3N −2) operations
per sample. This processing should be executed for both I
and Q paths, which means that the actual number of opera-
tions per sample (a couple of an I-sample and a Q-sample)
doubles and becomes 3N − 2. Consequently, the compu-
tational complexity (the number of operations per second
without distinguishing between addition and multiplication)
of a FIR filter operating at frequency F is:
CCF IRtime = (3N − 2) F (2)
For our proposed frequency domain implementation, we
use the overlap-add method [5] which consists of decom-
posing the signal into simple components, processing each
of the components, and recombining the processed compo-
nents into the final signal. If the input signal is segmented
into sections of length L and a FIR filter of length N is to
be implemented, a FFT of length L + N − 1 or more should
be performed to avoid time aliasing. In our study, we seg-
ment the input signal into sections of length N and thus we
use a FFT of length P where P is the minimal power of 2
greater than or equal to 2N . Each FFT of length P requires
5P log2 (P ) operations and processes N samples at a fre-
quency F to which we have to add 6 operations per sample
to perform the complex multiplication by the filter coeffi-
cients H. Hence, we get the computational complexity of
the frequency domain FIR filter of length N as:
 
P
CCF IRf req. = 2 5 log2 (P ) + 3 F (3)
N
The frequency domain filter proposed here directly pro-
cesses the I and Q paths. This is done by combining the
 Computational Complexity (MOPS)
6000 where
5000 Time domain FIR
Frequency domain FIR 1−α 1+α
4000 m= and M =
3000
2T 2T
2000

1000 4 Methodology
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
FIR filter length In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed FIR
implementation method in the frequency domain, especially
Figure 1. Computational complexities of dif- in terms of immunity against intersymbol interference and
ferent FIR implementations noise rejection, two FIR filter implementations are consid-
ered:

paths before entering the filter into complex samples that • a time domain filter of which the coefficients were ob-
will be treated by the direct and inverse FFT then breaking tained by sampling the RRC impulse response with an
the output again into two paths. In fact, from the linearity oversampling factor of 4 and which processes the I and
property of the Fourier transform, we can state that: Q paths successively;

F IRf (XI + jXQ ) = F −1 [F (XI + jXQ ) H] • the frequency domain filter with coefficients extracted
= F −1 [F (XI ) H + jF (XQ ) H] as discussed in section 3.2 and which combines the I
= F IRf (XI ) + jF IRf (XQ ) (4) an Q paths into one complex signal and processes the
two paths simultaneously.
where F IRf denotes the FIR filtering in frequency domain
and XI and XQ are the inputs on the I and Q paths respec- Note that in designing the filter, the sampling rate also
tively. needs to be considered. The higher the sampling rate the
Comparing the computational complexities of the 2 dif- easier it is after a digital to analogue converter to remove
ferent implementations of the FIR filter for different filter high frequency components generated in the sampling pro-
lengths leads to Fig. 1. From this figure, we can find that cess. The higher the sampling rate, the faster the converter
it is more advantageous to implement FIR filters in the fre- must operate, which in general will lead to greater cost and
quency domain for lengths 44 and more which is generally greater power consumption. To keep our approach realistic,
the case of the UMTS standard. (Note that the computa- we chose an oversampling factor of 4 (thus a sampling rate
tional complexity of the frequency domain FIR could be fs = 4 × chip rate = 15.36M Hz) as a compromise be-
further reduced if we take into account trivial multiplica- tween high performance on a hand and cost and complexity
tions in the FFT, which makes this type of filtering feasible on the other hand.
for even shorter filters) We then created two real random input signals of length
5000 points with values between −1 and 1 to simulate in-
3.2 Filter coefficients puts on the I and Q paths, and we included 3 null samples
between each adjacent values to simulate an oversampled
Instead of performing the FFT of the filter’s coefficients signal by a factor of 4. These signals where passed through
extracted by sampling the RRC time representation (1) like a classical time domain filter to get the transmitted signal.
shown in section 2, we take the ideal square root of the The two filter implementations (the time domain and our
raised cosine filter transfer function shown in (5) and sam- proposed frequency domain) are then applied to the trans-
ple it to get the coefficients that should be used in the fre- mitted signal. Note that results shown in the next section
quency domain FIR filter. This operation leads to the mod- where obtained by repeating the same operations on 100
ule of the coefficients which we have to multiply by a linear different random input signals.
πf
phase ϕH (f ) = exp(− 2T ). The resultant coefficients are
then used in the frequency domain implementation of the
FIR filter. 5 Performance evaluation

 
T
T

πT  0 ≤ |f | ≤ m
H(f ) = 1 + cos (|f | − m) m ≤ |f | ≤ M Following in this section, is the comparison between the
 2 α
0 |f | > M two filter implementation methods in terms of intersymbol
(5) interference and additive white Gaussian noise rejection.

3
 90 40
Gain in immunity against ISI(%)
80 Time domain FIR
30
Frequency domain FIR

EVM(%)
70
20
60
Minimum and maximum gains
Average gain 10
50

40 0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 0 50 100 150 200 250 300
FIR filter length FIR filter length

Figure 2. ISI immunity gain of frequency do- Figure 3. EVM of the two different filter imple-
main FIR implementation mentations

5.1 Intersymbol interference rejection mum requirement for the EVM: the EVM shall not exceed
17.5% in the user equipment radio trasmission and recep-
tion in the FDD mode [4]. This requirement is in fact one of
The main property of Nyquist filters is that they result
the key guidelines for choosing the appropriate length of the
in zero intersymbol interference (ISI) at the optimum sam-
FIR filter to use. The formula used to calculate the EVM is
pling point for filtered data [8]. This is why we present
presented in (6) where Perror is the root mean square power
here a comparison between a classical time domain FIR im-
of the error vector and Preference is the root mean square
plementation, and our frequency domain implementation.
power of the ideal transmitted signal.
The ISI is measured as the variance of the error between the
samples of the input signal and those of the received sig-
nals at the optimum sampling points. Fig. 2 shows the gain
in percentage of the frequency domain implementation over
the time domain implementation for different filter lengths.
From this figure, we can see that no pertinent conclusion
could be made about FIR filters of lengths 16 or less be-
cause the gain in ISI rejection clearly varies with the input
signal, the main reason is that such short filters do not re-
construct the input signal in a reliable way. For the other
FIR filters (the kind of filters suitable for UMTS), the gain
is about 72%. This gain is augmented to 99% if we use
a frequency domain implemented filter in the transmission
chain as well.
To have a better comparison of the immunity against ISI
of the two different filters, we compare two other parame-
ters: the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) and the peak dis-
tortion.
5.1.1 Error vector magnitude comparison
In literature discussing UMTS radio receivers, a parameter
called EVM is commonly used to indicate the amount of
∞    
ISI [7]. 3GPP technical specifications for the UMTS stan-
dard provide the following definition of EVM: “The Error
Vector Magnitude is a measure of the difference between
the reference waveform and the measured waveform. This
difference is called the error vector. ... The EVM result is
defined as the square root of the ratio of the mean error vec-
tor power to the mean reference power expressed as a per-
centage”. These technical specifications define also a mini-
4

Perror
EV M (%) = × 100 (6)
Preference
Simulations with different filter lengths and for the two
different FIR implementations discussed in this paper show
that the frequency domain implementation using the sam-
pled ideal filter transfer function is always better than the
time domain implementation. From Fig. 3, we can see that
the frequency domain implementation ensures that the min-
imum requirement of EVM is met even with a FIR filter of
length 8. Of course, the EVM is not the only criterion to
select the proper filter length, other decisive factors should
be considered like the filter immunity against noise and in-
terference.
5.1.2 Peak distortion comparison
Another parameter commonly used to measure the ISI of
a transmit-receive filter combination is the peak distortion
defined as follows [7]:
2 k=1 h N2 + kM 
Dp(dB) = 20 log10   N  (7)
h 
2
In (7), h is the impulse response of the transmit-receive
filter combination, N is the length of this response and M
is the oversample factor. Furthermore it has been assumed
that h is symmetric. In order to extract h, we passed a pulse
signal into two sets of transmit-receive filters. At first a
 0 References
Peak distortion (dB)
−10 Time domain FIR
Frequency domain FIR
−20
−30
−40
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
FIR filter length
Figure 4. Peak distortion of the two different
filter implementations
transmit and a receive filters implemented in the time do-
main then another set implemented in the frequency domain
(note that in this case both the transmit and the receive filters
are implemented in the frequency domain). The oversample
factor is always M = 4. Fig. 4 confirms that our frequency
domain FIR filter presents less peak distortion than the time
domain filter.
From this section we can conclude that, not only our fre-
quency implementation method of FIR filters is feasible for
the UMTS standard like demonstrated in section 3, but also
that this implementation presents better ISI rejection as con-
firmed by EVM and peak distortion comparison.
5.2 Additive white Gaussian noise rejec-
tion
The essential reason for implementing the raised cosine
filter as two RRC filters, one in the transmitter and the
other in the receiver, is that filtering in the receiver is es-
sential to reject the noise and interference present in the re-
ceiver [8]. Furthermore, to eliminate the Additive White
Gaussian Noise (AWGN) caused by the channel, the trans-
mit and receive filters transfer functions should be identical.
Now let us examine if our filter implementation in the fre-
quency domain with sampled ideal RRC transfer function,
linear phase and combined I and Q paths results in less or
more AWGN rejection than the classical time domain im-
plementation.
First we fix the transmit filter to a time domain imple-
mented FIR. A white Gaussian noise is then added to the
transmitted signal with a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of
16dB. The noisy signal is passed through the two receive
filters and the SNR is measured again. In both cases the
SNR is found to be augmented to 22dB. This means that
employing our frequency domain implemented filter will
not degrade the system’s performance concerning the rejec-
tion of the AWGN.
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