the orthogonality of ofdm
Simply, in OFDM orthogonality is preserved because the carriers are generated by taking the inverse FFT "or FFT, in fact" to the input...
now, think of the inverse of FFT as the representation in form of fourier series, in this case the signal consists of all sin and cosine components, fully orthogonal
My point is: the orthogonality comes from the definision of OFDM itself, not any extra things "cyclic prefix, pilots et, which ofcourse does help, no dought.