Improving SC-FDMA Performance by Turbo Equalization in UTRA LTE Uplink

Turbo equalization is known as an advanced iterative equalization and decoding technique that allows to enhance the performance of the data transmission over a frequency selective fading channel. The turbo equalizer will result in extra receiver complexity, but isolated to the base-station, which does not have stringent power constraints. In this paper, a turbo equalization technique to improve Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) performance is proposed. A new adaptive coefficients solution for frequency domain equalization is considered. The work is in the context of UTRA Long Term Evolution (LTE) Uplink. The performance is evaluated for 1x2 Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) antenna configuration in a 6 paths Typical Urban (TU-06) channel profile. For assessment purpose, the results are compared with SC-FDMA MMSE and OFDMA schemes. Simulation results show that the turbo equalizer can improve the BLER performance around 1 dB with only a few iterations, and improve the SC-FDMA performance over OFDM, especially at high coding rate.