Link level performance of Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) for Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) channel

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) advantages, such as flexible user and rate allocation or easy intersymbol interference compensation, explain its expansion. OFDM has shown resistance to multipath fading. However, OFDM suffers from high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) which may be particularly troublesome in certain environment such as satellite communications. Single Carrier Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) has become an alternative to OFDM due to its low PAPR. Described as a precoded version of OFDM, its performance is worse than that of OFDM for Rayleigh channels. In this work, the SC-FDMA performance over a simplified model for Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) channels is investigated for different Rice factor K, average delays, and allocated subcarriers. It is shown that, besides its lower PAPR, SC-FDMA outperforms OFDM due to the existence of a Line Of Sight (LOS) able to increase SC-FDMA resistance to fading further than that of OFDM.