Frequency Diversity Comparison of Coded SC-FDE & OFDM on Different Channels

This paper compares the relative performance of coded single carrier frequency domain equalisation (SC-FDE) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) on frequency-selective fading channels. We focus on the extent to which the two schemes can exploit the frequency diversity inherent in such channels. Channels with different impulse response lengths, and therefore available diversity order are considered, with convolutional codes of different rates and constraint lengths, and also turbo-codes. We show that on all channels SC-FDE has better performance with codes having smaller minimum distance. However with more powerful codes, which enable it to exploit the full frequency diversity available in the channel, OFDM has better performance, particularly on channels with greater diversity.