SC-FDMA

TD-LTE Air Interface

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SC-FDMA

OFDM vs. SC-FDMA

SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison
SC-FDMA Principles
SC-FDMA Transmitter
SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

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OFDM Benefits and Challenges
OFDM benefits:
Good performance in frequency selective fading channels.
Low complexity of base-band receiver.
Good spectral properties and handling of multiple bandwidths.
Link adaptation and frequency domain scheduling.
Compatibility with advanced receiver and antenna technologies.

OFDM Challenges
• Tolerance to frequency offset.
• The high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the transmitter
signal. It requires transmitter with linear response in a large range.
Those “high linear response” amplifier have a low power
conversion efficiency and therefore they are not ideal for Mobile
Stations. In LTE the problem was solved by adopting SC-FDMA for
Uplink, which has better power amplifier efficiency.

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Peak-to-Average Power Ratio in OFDM

The transmitted power is the sum of the

powers of all the subcarriers

• Due to large number of subcarriers,

the peak to average power ratio
(PAPR) tends to have a large range
• The higher the peaks, the greater the
range of power levels over which the
transmitter is required to work.
• Not best suited for use with mobile
( battery-powered) devices

• Solution?
-> see next slide

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SC-FDMA in UL

• Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access:

Transmission technique used for Uplink
• Variant of OFDM that reduces the PAPR:
– Combines the PAR of single-carrier system with the
multipath resistance and flexible subcarrier frequency
allocation offered by OFDM.

OFDMA
SC-FDMA
– It can reduce the PAPR between 6…9dB compared to
OFDMA
– TS36.201 and TS36.211 provide the mathematical
description of the time domain representation of an SC-
FDMA symbol.
• Reduced PAPR means lower RF hardware
requirements ( power amplifier)
• SC-FDMA will be used for both FDD and TDD
modes

6 © Nokia Siemens Networks TM51214EN03GLA1

SC-FDMA

OFDM vs. SC-FDMA

SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison
SC-FDMA Principles
SC-FDMA Transmitter
SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

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SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison

• OFDMA transmits data in parallel across multiple subcarriers

• SC-FDMA transmits data in series employing multiple subcarriers
• In the example:
– OFDMA: 6 modulation symbols ( 01,10,11,01,10 and 10) are transmitted per OFDMA
symbol, one on each subcarrier
– SC-FDMA: 6 modulation symbols are transmitted per SC-FDMA symbol using all
subcarriers per modulation symbol. The duration of each modulation symbol is 1/6th of
the modulation symbol in OFDMA

OFDMA SC-FDMA

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OFDMA Operation
Serial Bit Stream

0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0

66.67 µs LTE Symbol Time

15 kHz
0 1 Subcarrier
1 1
1 0
0 0
1 1
180 kHz

1 0
0 1
UE 0 0
1 1
0 1
1 0
0 0
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SC-FDMA Operation
Serial Bit Stream

0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0

66.67 µs LTE Symbol Time

Sub-Symbol

15 kHz
Subcarrier

0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0
180 kHz

UE 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0

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SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison

Difference in transmission: for SC-FDMA there is an extra block on the

transmission chain: the FFT (or DFT = Discrete Fourier Transform) block
which should “spread” the input modulation symbols over all the allocated
subcarriers
FFT or DFT (Discrete
Fourier Transform)

OFDM Transmission SC-FDMA Transmission

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SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison

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SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison

OFDM: power and amplitude SC-FDMA: power and amplitude

12000 12000

10000 10000

8000 8000

6000 6000

4000 4000

2000 2000

0 0
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000

120 120

100 100

80 80

60 60

40 40

20 20

0 0
-120 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 -120 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60 80 100 120

-20 -20

-40 -40

-60 -60

-80 -80

-100 -100

-120 -120

Lower PAPR for

the SC-FDMA
13 © Nokia Siemens Networks TM51214EN03GLA1
SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison – Overview
SC-FDMA and OFDMA
Commonalities
The same Variable Bandwidth
BW = 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 MHz
The same subcarrier spacing
Δf = 15KHz
The same symbol duration
Tsymbol = 66,7μs
The same Cyclic Prefix length
Normal CP = 4.69/5.12μsec
Extended CP = 16.67μsec
The same TTI = 1ms
The same frame format
Could be used for FDD and TDD
14 © Nokia Siemens Networks TM51214EN03GLA1
SC-FDMA and OFDMA
differences
• OFDMA transmits several
modulation symbols in parallel
• SC-FDMA transmits only one
single modulation symbol at a
time
• SC-FDMA is having an extra
block on the transmission chain
to spread the modulation
symbols over all the subcarriers
• SC-FDMA is having a lower
PAPAR = Peak to Average
Power Ratio than OFDMA
SC-FDMA

OFDM vs. SC-FDMA

SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison
SC-FDMA Principles
SC-FDMA Transmitter
SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

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 SC-FDMA Principles
1. PAPR is the same as that used for the input modulation symbols

This could be achieved by transmitting N

modulation symbols in series at N times the rate.
So that looking in time domain only one
modulation symbol is transmitted at a time.
One can see that the SC-FDMA symbol which is
having 67µs is containing N “sub-symbols”.
N = 6 in the example shown

2. The number of subcarriers which could be allocated for transmission

should be multiple of 2,3 and/or 5

This limitation is imposed by the input of the FFT (DFT) block which
is before the IFFT. This enables efficient implementation of the FFT.
Note that also the number of Resource Blocks should be multiple of
2,3 or/and 5

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 SC-FDMA Principles
3. The FFT (DFT) output size is always smaller than the IFFT input size

This is because a typical cell’s uplink capacity will be

greater than 180kHz (12 subcarriers), meaning that
more than one UL channel will be available. Other UEs FFT
will be assigned other groups of subcarriers to use (DFT) …
across the uplink channel bandwidth. No two UEs will
be assigned the same 180kHz block to use
Subcarriers allocated
simultaneously. for one UE .
As not all sub-carriers are used by the mobile station, . IFFT
many of them are set to zero in the diagram, if they .
are not used by other users Subcarriers
allocated to other
users or set to
Note that if the output size of the FFT is equal to the zero
size of the IFFT input then the overall effect is null
since the two operations (FFT and IFFT are
complementary)

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 SC-FDMA Principles
4. Adjusting the data rate in SC-FDMA

If the data rate increases more bandwidth is needed to transmit more modulation
symbols (when data rate is doubled the resource allocation in the frequency domain is
also doubled). The individual transmission is now shorter in time but wider in the
frequency domain. For double data rate the amount of inputs in transmitter doubles and
the “sub-symbol” duration is halved. Note that the SC-FDMA is still 67 µs
In the example 6 modulation symbols are sent initially and 12 modulations for double
data rate
Double
the data Halved SC-FDMA
rate “sub-symbol”
SC-FDMA duration
“sub-symbol”
duration

Doubled
Initial bandwidth
bandwidth

SC-FDMA SC-FDMA
symbol 67µs symbol 67µs
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SC-FDMA

OFDM vs. SC-FDMA

SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison
SC-FDMA Principles
SC-FDMA Transmitter
SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

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SC-FDMA Transmitter
s0

b10 ,b11,… Modulationd0

Modulation g1

K-to-N
s1

Mapping K-to-N
Mapper
Mapper

Frequency Domain
Frequency Domain

Up-conversion
Up-conversion
b20 ,b21,… Modulationd1
Modulation g2

Subcarrier Mapping
Time Domain

Generation
Generation
CP/Guard
CP/Guard
Binary Mapper
Mapper
Bit
Bit DFT
DFT
Coded . . . IFFT
IFFT Modulation
Distrib.
Distrib. (FFT)
(FFT)
Data . . .

Subcarrier
. . .
bK-1 0 … Modulation dK-1
Modulation gK-1
Mapper
Mapper
sN-1

s0
…

g0 sa
g1 sa+1

d0 d1 d2 … dK-1 DFT g2 sa+2

.
. …
. sa+x
gK-1
…
sN-1
20 © Nokia Siemens Networks TM51214EN03GLA1
SC-FDMA

OFDM vs. SC-FDMA

SC-FDMA and OFDMA Comparison
SC-FDMA Principles
SC-FDMA Transmitter
SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

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SC-FDMA Transmitter Simulation

• The same assumptions as for the OFDM transmission simulation are

considered

• The same data is generated like in the Downlink

• The major difference in the UL is the presence of the DFT = Discrete

Fourier Transform Block

• Another difference is the considered scenario:

– Scenario : 1200 subcarriers transmitted from 3 terminals (each terminal is
having equal allocation i.e. 400 subcarriers)

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 Unlike OFDM
QPSK Modulation modulation, this time we
can look at the QPSK
modulated symbol
succession as being a
time series !

• Discrete Fourier Transform

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DFT output – frequency domain

d0, d1, …, dk-1 DFT

DFT g0, g1, …, gk-1

Time Frequency
Domain Domain

DFT transform the time series (the modulation

symbols input) into frequency domain symbols
sequence.
One can see that the data symbols are
transmitted serially. The SC-FDMA symbol
contains 400 “sub-symbols” for each terminal.
For simplicity only the first 40 symbols are
shown
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 DFT Output –
Spectrum Representation
Terminal 1

Terminal 2

• The spectrum shows how one

modulation symbol is spread
over the bandwidth
• Each modulation symbol is Terminal 3
spread over the entire
400×15KHz=6MHz bandwidth
available for each terminal
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Subcarriers Mapping & IFFT

• Subcarrier Mapping & IFFT =

Inverse Fast Fourier
Transform

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Subcarriers Mapping

Could be achieved by inserting zeros among the output of the DFT

The zero padded DFT output is mapped to the number of subcarriers (IFFT
size)

The position of zeros should determine to which subcarriers the data is

mapped

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 Subcarrier Mapping
Terminal 1 – transmits in
the 0-6 MHz range

Terminal 2 – has been allocated for the

next 400 subcarriers, hence it transmits
in the 6-12 MHz range

Terminal 3 – is scheduled in the last

available 400 subcarriers, therefore it
transmits in 12-18MHz range

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 IFFT Output – Time Domain Representation

x0, x1, …, xN-1

IFFT
IFFT
Time
Domain

The PAR is the same as

that used for the original
modulation symbols
because of serial
transmission

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Subcarriers Mapping

• Up -
Conversion
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Up-conversion

Time
domain

Frequency
domain

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SC-FDMA Simulation Overview

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