Single carrier FDMA for uplink wireless transmission

Abstract

Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA), a modified form of OrthogoFDMA (OFDMA), is a promising technique for high data rate uplink communications in future cellular systems. SC-FDMA has similar throughput performance and essentially the same overall complexity as OFDMA. A principal advantage of SC-FDMA is the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which is lower than that of OFDMA. SCFDMA is currently a strong candidate for the uplink multiple access scheme in the Long Term Evolution of cellular systems under consideration by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). In this paper, we give an overview of SC-FDMA. We also analyze the effects of subcarrier mapping on throughput and PAPR. Among the possible subcarrier mapping approaches, we find that localized FDMA (LFDMA) with channel-dependent scheduling (CDS) results in higher throughput than interleaved FDMA (IFDMA). However, the PAPR performance IFDMA is better than that of LFDMA. As in other communications systems there are complex tradeoffs between design parameters and performance in an SC-FDMA system. © 2006 IEEE.