A novel look at FDE multicarrier and single carrier transmission schemes

In this paper, main single carrier (SC) and multicarrier (MC) systems with frequency domain equalization (FDE) are reviewed with the objective to identify key features of the evolution path of air interfaces towards 4G. In particular, this paper shows that the FFT/IFFT operation can be seen as the concatenation of two operations: S/P conversion and spreading. We show that the transmitter of an OFDMA system performs a S/P conversion and a multiplication with specific complex spreading codes. By replacing the orthogonal complex spreading codes of this equivalent OFDMA system, with traditional orthogonal spreading codes that are used in DS-CDMA systems, for instance Walsh-Hadamard codes, we achieve a novel multicode-CDMA system. The comparison of this novel SC transmission scheme with other SC and MC systems shows that the novel SC system has almost the same performance as OFDMA and also similar PAPR. On the other hand, it has a pretty different behavior wrt other SC systems such as IFDMA and DS-CDMA with FDE.