Joint Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding and Optimum Transmit Power Allocation for SC-FDMA

Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) has been selected as the uplink transmission scheme in the 3GPP Long Term Evolution standard. SC-FDMA has reduced sensitivity to phase noise and a lower Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) compared to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access. In this paper we propose joint Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding and transmit power allocation for SC-FDMA. We derive the optimum power allocation for SC-FDMA transmission for both Zero-Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) LE receivers in order to maximize the achievable data rate subject to constant transmit power. Although this improves the system´s performance and offers a 1-2 dB improvement over Frequency-Domain Decision Feedback Equalization (FD-DFE), when the proposed transmit power allocation scheme is combined with decision feedback equalization the system incurs a performance degradation due to error propagation. In this paper we propose a joint implementation of the derived power allocation scheme with THP. Here we show that the system´s performance is further improved over both FD-LE and FD-DFE when transmit power allocation is applied.