Study of Multiple Access Schemes in 3GPP LTE

OFDMA vs. SC-FDMA

Mountassir Jamal, Balta Horia, Kovaci Maria and Isar Alexandru
Communications Department, Electronics and Telecommunications Faculty, Politehnica University, Timisoara,
Romania
mountassir.jamal@gmail.com, {horia.balta, maria.kovaci,alexandru.isar}@etc.upt.ro

Abstract 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.
Keywords OFDMA, SC-FDMA, LTE, Rayleigh
channel.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless digital communication is rapidly
expanding resulting in a demand for wireless system
that are reliable and have a high spectral efficiency.
The demand for higher data rate is leading to
utilization of wider bandwidth resulting severe
frequency selectivity of the channel and thus the
problem of Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) becomes
more serious. In a conventional single carrier
communication system, time equalization in the form
of tap delay line filtering is performed to eliminate
ISI. However, in case of wide band channel, the
length of the time domain filter to perform
equalization becomes prohibitively large since it
linearly increases with the channel response length.
One way to mitigate the frequency-selective
fading encountered in a wide band channel is to use a
multicarrier technique which subdivides the entire
bandwidth of the channel into smaller sub bands,
around each subcarrier. Orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier
modulation technique which uses orthogonal
subcarriers to transmit information. In the frequency
domain, since the bandwidth of a subcarrier is
designed to be smaller than the coherence bandwidth
of the channel, each sub-channel is seen as a flat
fading channel which simplifies the equalization
process. In the time domain, by splitting a high-rate
data stream into a number of lower-rate data streams
that are transmitted in parallel, OFDM resolves the
problem of ISI in wide band communications [1]. But
OFDM has its limitations: high PAPR, high
sensitivity to frequency offset, and a need for an
adaptive or coded scheme to overcome spectral nulls
in the channel [2], [3].

One of the most difficult problems in the design of

a base station (BS) is the dynamic of its power
amplifier. The length of the interval of levels of the
input signal for which the device has a linear
comportment defines the dynamic of a power
amplifier. Any non-linearity produces distortions of
the transmitted signal which affect the performance of
the corresponding receiver. Generally, these nonlinearities appear at the margins of the interval of
levels of the input signal. The amplification of a
signal with a high PAPR value requires a power
amplifier with an extended dynamic. In consequence,
the utilization of signals with reduced PAPR values
simplifies the design of power amplifiers for wireless
communications.
In this paper, we give an overview of SC-FDMA
systems, which is a newly developed multiple access
scheme adopted in the uplink of 3GPP LTE, and show
some research results on its PAPR characteristics.
The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows: Section II gives an overview of OFDMA and
SC-FDMA. Section III shows link level simulation
results on Rayleigh flat fading channel, and we
conclude our work in Section IV.
II. OFDMA VS. SC-FDMA
LTE uses OFDMA to solve the problem of
multiple access in downlink. Different groups of
subcarriers are allocated simultaneously to different
users. The OFDMA system transmits information on
M orthogonal subcarriers,each operating bit rate of
1/M fold bit rate of the original signal. This rate
decrease helps to alleviate the multipath effect of the
channel and reduces the equalizer complexity in the
receiver [4]. On the other hand, OFDMA is sensitive
to Doppler Shift which creates interferences between
subcarriers, and suffers of high PAPR. This is due to
the unpredictable envelope fluctuations of the signal
obtained after the inverse fast Fourier transform
(IFFT) computation.
SC-FDMA is used by the LTE system in uplink
transmission to solve the problem of multiple access
and is based on single carrier modulation with
frequency domain equalization (SC/FDE). There are
some advantages of SC-FDMA in comparison with
OFDMA which justifies the selection of SC-FDMA
for the uplink in LTE.
The main advantage of SC-FDMA versus
OFDMA is that this type of transmission has lower

PAPR.
SC-FDMA spreads the energy of one subcarrier
over the range of all subcarriers before the
computation of IFFT. This way the spectral nulls in
the channel is reduced with averaging. Hence, PAPR
is reduced. This subtle idea is implemented by
introducing an additional FFT block before the IFFT
block of the transmitter as it can be seen in Fig. 1. In
OFDMA systems, the information bits are first
converted to complex numbers by modulation. Next
the complex numbers are mapped in symbols of
length M. The IFFT of the symbol is computed
obtaining the amplitude modulation of each of the M
subcarriers with one of the bits composing the
symbol. This could be seen as an independent
transmission of each bit on a different subcarrier, all
these signals being transmitted simultaneously. The
IFFT block converts the symbols (regarded as spectra)
from the frequency domain into the time domain. In
the OFDMA uplink, each mobile station uses only n
subcarriers out of M and leaves the rest null in the
IFFT process.
In the SC-FDMA uplink, the complex numbers
already mentioned are treated first by an additional Npoint FFT block in order to spread the energy over all
the subcarriers. The N point FFT multiplies each of
the N input complex numbers with a multiplier,
generating output samples which represent linear
combinations of the input samples. So, SC-FDMA
spreads the energy of one subcarrier over the range of
all the N subcarriers.
The samples obtained by the FFT computation are
sent to the M-point IFFT block as in OFDMA. Note
that N < M . Hence the sequence obtained after the
computation of the FFT must be completed with zeros
to reach the length M. As in the OFDMA case, these
zeros are transmitted on unoccupied subcarriers [4].
The architecture of the receiver for the OFDMA
case utilizes a simple equalizer per subcarrier
connected after the block which computes the FFT.
The architecture of the receiver for the SC-FDMA
case utilizes a complex equalizer connected at the
input of the N-IFFT computation block. The
computation of the IFFT in the transmitter removes

Figure 1. Transmitter and receiver structure for SC-FDMA.

the spreading energy effect of the computation of the

FFT. Notice that the result of the IFFT is again a time
domain signal. This is the reason why in the

architecture of the receiver, the signal obtained at the

output of the N-point IFFT computation block is sent
to a single detector to estimate the bits of the message
received.
The architecture of the receiver in the case of SCFDMA is more complex than the architecture of the
OFDMA receiver, but the design of the power
amplifier used in the transmitter is simpler in the case
of SC-FDMA because the value of the PAPR is
smaller in this case. This observation recommends the
SC-FDMA as an uplink transmission scheme, since
the power efficiency and complexity is more
important for mobile stations than for the base station.
There are two methods in SC-FDMA to choose
the subcarriers for transmission; distributed subcarrier
mapping and localized subcarrier mapping.
Distributed mapping (interleaved FDMA or IFDMA)
introduces a bandwidth spreading factor to take into
account the interleaving of the subcarriers allocated to
a user. If the mapping starts from rth subcarrier, which
index is between 0 and Q (
), then the
IFDMA time sample can be represented as:

x m =

1 j 2 z (r )
e
x m where m = m mod N
Q

(1)

and z(r) is an additional phase rotation.

The localized mapping (LFDMA) maps the
subcarriers allocated to a user adjacent to each other.
The LFDMA time samples are equal to:
x m =

N 1
xi
1
1 e j 2 y (r )
j
2 w(r ,i )
QN
i=0 1 e

(2)

where y (r ) and w(r , i ) are additional phase and

complex-weighting factors respectively.
In 3GPP LTE uplink, the available data
modulation schemes are QPSK and 16-QAM. In the
time domain, one radio frame has duration of 10 ms
and it consists of 20 slots. Also, two slots comprise a
sub-frame. One slot consists of 7 long blocks (LB)
with circular prefix (CP). The middle LB is used for
reference signal (RS), or pilot signal. Fig. 2 illustrates
the frame/slot structure. In the frequency domain, a
resource block (RB) spans 12 subcarriers over one
slot duration of 0.5 ms and one subcarrier has
bandwidth of 15 kHz.

Figure 2. Frame structure for frequency duplex transmission.

III. PEAK-TO-AVERAGE POWER RATIO

One of the significant drawbacks of the OFDMA

system is the possibility to experience large peaks

since the signal shows a random variable
characteristic since it is sum of N independent
complex random variables. These different carriers
may all line up in phase at some instant and
consequently produce a high peak, which is quantified
by PAPR.
This distorts the transmitted signal if the
transmitter contains nonlinear components such as
power amplifiers (PAs), since PA is forced to operate
in the nonlinear region. The nonlinear effects may
cause in-band or out-of-band distortion to signals such
as spectral spreading, intermodulation, or change the
signal constellation.
Out-of-band distortion is detrimental even if the
in-band distortion is tolerable. To have distortionless
transmission, the PAs require a backoff, which is
approximately equal to the PAPR. This decreases the
efficiency for amplifiers and increases the cost. High
PAPR also requires high range and precision for the
analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-toanalog converter (DAC), as a result, reducing the
PAPR of practical interest.
The theoretical relationship between PAPR and
transmit power efficiency is given by:
= max

PAPR
10 20

(3)

where is the power efficiency and max is the

maximum power efficiency. For class A power
amplifier, max is 50% and 78.5% for Class B power
amplifiers.
If X is data vector of length N, time domain vector
in the transmitter is x = [x 0 , , x n 1 ] = IDWT ( X) and
the PAPR is then defined to be:

PAPR(x) =

E x

2
2

carrier structure. The lower PAPR is greatly

beneficial in the uplink communications where the
mobile terminal is the transmitter. Time domain
samples of SC-FDMA modulated signals are different
depending on the subcarrier mapping scheme and we
can expect different PAPR characteristics for different
subcarrier mapping schemes [7].
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section we will present some simulation
results of OFDMA and SC-FDMA in different
scenarios.
The following results was obtained by considering
a simple Rayleigh flat fading channel with the
1
standard deviation equal to
, and an additive
2
white Gaussian noise (AWGN).
In Fig. 3, we can see that the SER performance of
SC-FDMA (IFDMA) in flat Rayleigh fading channel
is poorer than SER performance on AWGN channel,
it can be observed that fading channel produces a
deterioration of performances of about 2 dB when
SER = 10 5 .
In Fig. 4 is shown the SER performance of SCFDMA for two different subcarrier mapping schemes,
IFDMA and LFDMA, in flat fading Rayleigh channel.
We can observe the similarity between their SER
performances.
To compare the PAPR of OFDMA and SCFDMA, a MATLAB simulation was done [7] with the
same input parameters. The SC-FDMA signal is
passed through a raised-cosine pulse shaping filter
and rectangular pulse shaping filter respectively. The
OFDMA signal is not pulse shaped.
In Fig. 5, PAPR of IFDMA, LFDMA and
OFDMA are presented. We presented the CCDF

(4)

/ N

where E() denotes expectation.

and

represent the -norm and 2-norm respectively.

Therefore,

2
2

= 2 denotes the average power.

When N is large, the output time vector converges to

Gaussian distribution due to central limit theorem.
Hence, the probability that the PAPR is above a
threshold is written as:

Pr{PAPR > } = 1 1 e

).
N

(5)
Figure 3. SER for SC-FDMA in AWGN and Rayleigh channel.

Unlike OFDM, statistical properties of PAPR for

single carrier modulations are not easily obtained
analytically [6]. We thus resort to numerical analysis
to investigate the PAPR properties.
A salient advantage of SC-FDMA over OFDMA
is the lower PAPR because of its inherent single

Fig. 3). Next, we have compared the two types of

subcarriers mappings used in SC-FDMA, the IFDMA
and the LFDMA, in a flat fading Rayleigh scenario
and we have proved the superiority of IFDMA (see
Fig. 4). Finally we have proven the superiority of the
SC-FDMA versus the OFDMA from the PAPR point
of view. Both SC-FDMA types of mapping schemes
produce small PAPR values for the same value of
PAPR0 than the OFDMA (see Fig. 5).
From the informatics point of view we have added
at the simulator in [7] a new function associated with
the flat fading Rayleigh channel.
Figure 4. Comparison of SER IFDMA and LFDMA in flat fading
Rayleigh channel.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research reported in this paper was developed
in the framework of a grant funded by the Romanian
Research Council (CNCSIS) with the title Using
wavelets theory for decision making no.
349/13.01.09.
REFERENCES

Figure 5. Comparison of complementary cumulative distribution

function (CCDF) of PAPR for IFDMA, LFDMA, and OFDMA
with total number of subcarriers M = 512, and QPSK modulation.

(Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function)

of PAPR, which is the probability that PAPR is higher
than
a
certain
PAPR
value
PAPR0
( Pr{PAPR > PAPR0} ).
We can see that all the cases of SCFDMA have
indeed lower PAPR than that of OFDMA. Also,
IFDMA has the lowest PAPR.
V. CONCLUSION
We have presented a comparison between two
multi-user access strategies, the OFDMA used in
WiMAX and in LTE in downlink and the SC-FDMA
used in LTE in uplink, based on simulations. We have
proved first that the SC-FDMA has good performance
on AWGN and flat fading Rayleigh channels (see

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