Single Carrier Modulation With Nonlinear Frequency Domain Equalization: An Idea Whose Time Has Come—Again

By Nevio Benvenuto, Rui Dinis, David D. Falconer, Stefano Tomasin. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2010

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years single carrier modulation (SCM) has again become an interesting and complementary alternative to multicarrier modulations such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This has been largely due to the use of nonlinear equalizer structures implemented in part in the frequency domain by means of fast Fourier transforms, bringing the complexity close to that of OFDM. Here a nonlinear equalizer is formed with a linear filter to remove part of intersymbol interference, followed by a canceler of remaining interference by using previous detected data. Moreover, the capacity of SCM is similar to that of OFDM in highly dispersive channels only if a nonlinear equalizer is adopted at the receiver. Indeed, the study of efficient nonlinear frequency domain equalization techniques has further pushed the adoption of SCM in various standards. This tutorial paper aims at providing an overview of nonlinear equalization methods as a key ingredient in receivers of SCM for wideband transmission. We review both hybrid (with filters implemented both in time and frequency domain) and all-frequency-domain iterative structures. Application of nonlinear frequency domain equalizers to a multiple input multiple output scenario is also investigated, with a comparison of two architectures for interference reduction. We also present methods for channel estimation and alternatives for pilot insertion. The impact on SCM transmission of impairments such as phase noise, frequency offset and saturation due to high power amplifiers is also assessed. The comparison among the considered frequency domain equalization techniques is based both on complexity and performance, in terms of bit error rate or throughput.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb03a2cf5c0e046d048fd19c6fe03111e3769567

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In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Lajos Hanzo
2. Merouane Debbah
3. Shaoshi Yang
4. Geoffrey Y. Li
5. Len Cimini
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Merouane Debbah
2. Lajos Hanzo
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8. Stefano Buzzi

Citations in the corpus

• Twelve Scientific Challenges for 6G: Rethinking the Foundations of Communications Theory (2022, background): “1) Equal Gain Criterion: In [66], [67], it has been demonstrated that, under the assumption of channel state information (CSI) only available at the receiver side, and when a perfect feedback equalizer [68], [69] is employed, an optimal waveform in terms of coded modulation capacity, needs to spread”
• Modulation Formats and Waveforms for 5G Networks: Who Will Be the Heir of OFDM?: An overview of alternative modulation schemes for improved spectral efficiency (2014, background): “Recently, however, there has been regained interest in single carrier techniques due to the development of high-performance and low-complexity equalizers operating in the frequency domain [22]–[24].”
• Fifty Years of MIMO Detection: The Road to Large-Scale MIMOs (2015, background): “Additionally, there are more advanced multicarrier based orthogonal multiple-access techniques, such as orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) [166]–[168], single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA)3 [169], and multicarrier CDMA [170]–[177].”
• Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Communication for Future Wireless Systems: A Survey (2018, background): “However, the disadvantage of OFDM in terms of high peak to average power ratio (PAPR), which demands the use of high-quality and high-cost power amplifiers (PA) and results in severe degradation in bit error ratio (BER) performance [109], makes it unattractive for mmWave massive MIMO systems, and fa”
• Channel Estimation for OFDM (2014, background): “For single-carrier frequency division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) transmission [30], it can also be DFT-spread data signals.”
• Orthogonal Chirp Division Multiplexing (2016, methodology): “In this subsection, we investigate the performance of the iterative block DFE (IB-DFE) [50], [55]–[57] for the proposed OCDM system without channel coding.”