Initial Performance Evaluation of DFT-Spread OFDM Based SC-FDMA for UTRA LTE Uplink

In this paper we present an initial performance evaluation of the 3GPP UTRA long term evolution (UTRA LTE) uplink with baseline settings. The performance results are obtained from a detailed UTRA LTE uplink link level simulator supporting OFDMA and SC-FDMA schemes. The basic transmission scheme for uplink direction is based on single-carrier transmission in the form of DFT spread OFDM with an MMSE receiver. Two antenna configurations, SISO and 1times2 SIMO are considered in the analysis of spectral efficiency in addition to adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and L1-HARQ. For assessment purposes, the performance results of SC-FDMA are compared with OFDMA. It is shown that 1times2 SIMO greatly increases the spectral efficiency of SC-FDMA making it comparable to OFDMA, especially for high coding rate. Furthermore, SC-FDMA has a flexibility to increase BLER performance by exploiting frequency diversity.