Comparison of SC-FDMA and NC-OFDM schemes for cognitive radio networks

In order to implement cognitive radio (CR) in the future, the choice of a physical layer data transmission scheme is very important. In this paper, we compare two agile transmission schemes employed for CR networks: Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) and non-contiguous OFDM (NC-OFDM). First, a qualitative comparison is provided by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme. Then the performances of both schemes are compared by simulation. The simulation results and corresponding analyses demonstrate that the performance of SC-FDMA is generally better than NC-OFDM in CR networks. Therefore, SC-FDMA can be a promising alternative to NC-OFDM for CR networks.