Comparison of Spectral Efficiency for OFDM and SC-FDE under IEEE 802.16 Scenario

Single carrier with frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) has been adopted by IEEE 802.16 standard as an alternative technique of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in physical layer. Reference [1] proposed the SC-FDE system utilizing channel state information (CSI), which can improve the performance through transmitting information on available frequency-domain subchannels; that is, a part of spectrum in the system proposed in [1] is left unused. This paper compares the spectral efficiency of OFDM and SC-FDE, and gives some simulation results under IEEE 802.16 scenario [3]. Simulation results show that when partial CSI is utilized, SC-FDE systems can achieve much higher spectral efficiency than coded OFDM; if both SC-FDE and OFDM systems use one bit CSI per-subchannel, SC-FDE outperforms OFDM obviously.