Comparison of multi-carrier modulation techniques

This work presents a side-by-side comparison between two multi-carrier schemes which have equal bandwidth, information rate, and transmit power. One system uses many narrow sub-bands, while the other is made up of fewer relatively-wide sub-bands. Closed-form expressions for the average bit error probability (BEP) are derived for both systems under two different cases for the coherence bandwidth of the channel, where estimates of the channel are obtained at the receiver via pilot symbols inserted among the data. These results are compared with those where the availability of perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver is assumed. Finally, the trade-offs between the two systems are investigated under different values for the information rate, number of users in the system, and number of pilot symbols used in the estimate