SFBC design tradeoffs for mobile SC-FDMA with application to LTE-advanced

Single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) has been adopted in the uplink of the LTE standard due to its lower peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) compared to orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Recent activities in the LTE-advanced (LTE-A) standardization have focused on effective uplink transmit diversity schemes with low PAPR but without considering the performance degradation due to Doppler despite the fact that LTE-A is required to support high mobility. In this paper, we present an open-loop space-frequency block coding (SFBC) scheme for the SC-FDMA uplink and demonstrate its robustness to high Doppler and large multipath delay spread while enjoying full spatial diversity, low PAPR and practical decoding complexity by a suitable design of the frequency span of each SFBC codeword. In this paper, we study the design tradeoffs involved in SFBC design for mobile SC-FDMA.