Single-carrier transmission with frequency-domain based code-division multi-access

Single-carrier (SC) transmission is a promising transmission scheme for uplink transmission because of its low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Spread spectrum (SS) transmission achieves higher frequency diversity gain and hence improves the bit error rate (BER) performance. The authors have recently proposed SC with frequency-domain spread spectrum (SC-FDSS) transmission, where spreading and de-spreading are conducted in frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a new code-division multi-access (CDMA) scheme based on SC-FDSS for multi-user environment, called SC with frequency-domain CDMA (SC-FD-CDMA). Theoretical analysis on conditional BER of the uplink SC-FD-CDMA is presented. The BER analysis is confirmed by the computer simulation together with PAPR evaluation. BER and PAPR of SC-FD-CDMA are compared with direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) and multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA).