Performance Analysis of OFDMA and SC-FDMA Multiple Access Techniques for Next Generation Wireless Communications

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) are the two major multiple access schemes for 4G wireless communications. In long term evolution (LTE) the downlink multiple access scheme is based on OFDMA and the uplink multiple access scheme is based on SC-FDMA. In this letter, we derive the fundamental performance difference between OFDMA and SC-FDMA, and present the general performance comparison between them. Analytical results show that OFDMA performance upper bounds SC-FDMA in the sense of capacity. The conclusion is further confirmed by numerical results.