Performance comparison of Single Carrier Modulation with frequency domain equalization an OFDM for wireless communications

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has the inherent problem of high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). Moreover, it suffers from high sensitivity to frequency offsets and narrowband interference (NBI). Contrary to this, Single Carrier Modulation (SCM) offers smaller PAPR and reduced sensitivity to NBI. However, it requires an efficient channel equalization technique. In literature, frequency domain channel equalization has been proposed for SCM systems in wireless communications. It also possesses the advantage of lower complexity in signal processing, as in the case of OFDM. This paper presents performance comparison between OFDM and SCM with frequency domain equalization for multipath wireless channel. SCM utilizes minimum mean square error (MMSE) algorithm for the training of the frequency domain equalizer. It is shown that SCM employing a frequency domain MMSE equalizer has a better bit error rate (BER) performance than OFDM. Also, the performance comparison of SCM and OFDM systems in the presence of NBI over additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) link shows that SCM is less sensitive to NBI.