Spectral Efficiency of Interleaved SC-FDMA With Adaptive Modulation and Coding Over Nakagami- $m$ Fading Channels

Because it achieves similar performance to that of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) with much more favorable envelope characteristics and lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) was chosen as the uplink transmission technology for Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced systems. This choice has provoked a growing interest in this transmission technology; therefore, there is extensive literature on its performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) and PAPR. However, research on its spectral efficiency has been scarce until now. This paper aims to help fill this gap with an analytical study of the spectral efficiency in SC-FDMA when adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and linear frequency-domain equalization are applied. This paper therefore computes the spectral efficiency for zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum-mean-square-error frequency-domain equalization (MMSE-FDE) for different Nakagami-m fading channels.