Study of multiple access schemes in 3GPP LTE OFDMA vs. SC-FDMA

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) are currently used for downlink and uplink multiple access schemes in 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE). In this paper, we give an overview of both OFDMA and SC-FDMA. We also show their dependence of symbol error rate (SER) on signal to noise ratio (SNR) in flat fading Rayleigh channel, and their Peak-to-Average Power ratio (PAPR) curves.