Cyclic Prefix

In telecommunications, the term cyclic prefix refers to the prefixing of a symbol with a repetition of the end. Although the receiver is typically configured to discard the cyclic prefix samples, the cyclic prefix serves two purposes.

• As a guard interval, it eliminates the intersymbol interference from the previous symbol.
• As a repetition of the end of the symbol, it allows the linear convolution of a frequency-selective multipath channel to be modelled as circular convolution, which in turn may be transformed to the frequency domain using a discrete Fourier transform. This approach allows for simple frequency-domain processing, such as channel estimation and equalization.

In order for the cyclic prefix to be effective (i.e. to serve its aforementioned objectives), the length of the cyclic prefix must be at least equal to the length of the multipath channel. Although the concept of cyclic prefix has been traditionally associated with OFDM systems, the cyclic prefix is now also used in single carrier systems to improve the robustness to multipath.