Impact of Radio Resource Allocation and Pulse Shaping on Papr of SC-FDMA Signals

"Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access" (SC- FDMA) is a strong candidate for uplink transmissions in the 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. SC-FDMA is a multiple access scheme that uses DFT spreading prior to OFDM modulation to map the signal from each user to a subset of the available subcarriers. SC-FDMA has a significantly lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) compared to OFDM/OFDMA. This greatly improves its RF power amplifier efficiency and also the mean power output from a battery driven mobile terminal. In this paper, the impact of radio resource allocation and pulse shaping on the PAPR of SC-FDMA signals are investigated, especially for localized FDMA (LFDMA) signals. It is shown that distributed FDMA (DFDMA) signals with raised cosine filtering experience reduced PAPR as a increases. However, for LFDMA signals the PAPR increases with increasing α and further varies according to the allocated resource unit.