Generalization of single-carrier and multicarrier cyclic prefixed communication

This paper describes a cyclic prefixed communication structure that is a generalization of both the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system and the cyclic prefixed single-carrier (CP-SC) system. By exploiting the fact that a circulant matrix (CM) is also a block circulant matrix (BCM), the proposed generalized cyclic prefixed (GCP) communication system provides an additional degree of freedom that allows trade-offs among peak-to-average power ratio (PAR), bit allocation capability, and frequency diversity. Instead of one large IDFT operation as in the OFDM transmitter, GCP time interleaves multiple smaller sized IDFT operations, so that PAR is correspondingly reduced. By appropriately selecting the block size in the BCM, the PAR value and the number of subcarriers for bit allocation can be chosen regardless of the length of the transmission block. When the block size in BCM is selected to be one or the entire size of the transmission block, the proposed GCP becomes OFDM or CPSC, respectively.