BER performance of SC-FDMA with subcarrier sharing: Improvements on spectral efficiency

In this paper, we propose a multiuser detection approach that can be used in Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) systems in order to increase its power/spectral efficiency. As opposed to conventional SC-FDMA systems, SC-FDMA with subcarrier sharing allows multiple users to share a common set of subcarrier, thus allowing more data to be transmitted without increasing the bandwidth or going to a higher modulation order. Simulation results show that multiuser SC-FDMA with subcarrier sharing can considerably increase the spectral efficiency of the communication system while maintaining a similar performance to conventional SC-FDMA in terms of bit error rate (BER) and power consumption.