Performance of Single-Carrier Block Transmissions Over Multipath Fading Channels With Linear Equalization

We study uncoded bit-error-rate (BER) performances of single-carrier block transmissions, zero-padded (ZP), and cyclic-prefixed (CP) transmission, when linear equalizers are applied and the BERs are averaged over one block. We show analytically that the BER of ZP transmission with linear equalization degrades as the bandwidth efficiency increases, i.e., there is a tradeoff between BER and bandwidth efficiency in ZP transmission. It is also proven that when minimum mean-squared-error (MMSE) equalization is adopted, ZP transmission outperforms CP transmission and uncoded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) on the average over random channels. However, the difference between the ZP and the CP transmission becomes smaller as the block size gets larger, since the average BER performance of the ZP transmission degrades, while the average BER performance of CP transmission improves, as a function of the block size. Numerical examples are provided to validate our theoretical findings and to compare the block transmission systems