Performance of zero-forcing equalizers for single-carrier zero-padded transmissions over multipath fading channels

We study the bit-error rate (BER) performance of single-carrier (SC) zero-padded (ZP) transmissions with zero-forcing (ZF) equalization. Padded redundant zeros mitigate multipath effects but reduce the bandwidth efficiency. We show analytically that the BER improves as the bandwidth efficiency decreases, i.e., there is a clear trade-off between BER and bandwidth efficiency. We also demonstrate that ZP outperforms SC cyclic prefixed (CP) transmission.