Single Carrier FDMA: A New Air Interface for Long Term Evolution

1

Introduction

In less than three decades, the status of cellular telephones has moved from laboratory breadboard via curious luxury item to the world's most pervasive consumer electronics product. Cellular phones have incorporated an ever-growing array of other products including pagers, cameras, camcorders, music players, game machines, organizers, and web browsers. Even though wired telephony is 100 years older and the beneficiary of “universal service” policies in developed countries, the number of cellular phones has exceeded wired phones for a few years and the difference keeps growing. For hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, cellular communications is the only form of telephony they have experienced.

First conceived as a marriage of mature telephony and mature radio communications, cellular communications is now widely recognized as its own technical area and a driver of innovation in a wide range of technical fields including – in addition to telephony and radio – computing, electronics, cryptography, and signal processing.

1.1 Generations

The subject of this book, Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA), is a novel method of radio transmission under consideration for deployment in future cellular systems. The development of SC-FDMA represents one step in the rapid evolution of cellular technology. Although technical progress is continuous and commercial systems frequently adopt new improvements, certain major advances mark the transition ...