Comparative Study of Up-link Methods: O-FDMA vs. SC-FDMA in LTE Networks

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access(OF-DMA) is susceptible to interference in dense deployment scenarios. When several users transmit data simultaneously over the same frequency band, interference between subcarriers can occur, degrading the quality of service. An OF-DMA has a high peak–to-average-power ratio (PAPR) and managing PAPR is challenging for high power applications. Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is an emerging approach for achieving high data rates and mitigating inter-symbol interference (ISI). Though, the high PAPR in OFDMA leads to signal distortion due to nonlinearity at the receiver's end. Therefore, SC-FDMA technology is used to compensate this issue. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has implemented uplink communication in its next-generation cellular technology, known as Long-Term Evolution (LTE). The experiments are conducted for both SC-FDMA and OFDMA using PAPR and Bit Error Rate (BER) metrics. The results revealed that-the SC-FDMA has achieved the least PAPR and BER compared to OFDMA.