BER analysis for MMSE-FDE-based interleaved SC-FDMA systems over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, we present an analytical study of the bit error rate (BER) for interleaved single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems over independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Nakagami-m fading channels with fading parameters {m} being integers when minimum mean-square error frequency-domain equalization (MMSE-FDE) is applied. Under the assumption of independent fading characteristics among channel frequency responses (CFRs) at the allocated subcarriers for a specific user, accurate numerical BER computation for square M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) is developed by exploiting the statistics of the equalized noise. More importantly, the BER derivation is based on the real distribution of the CFRs without applying the widely used approximation of the CFRs in previous literature, resulting in a more accurate BER analysis. Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to validate the analysis.