BER and Throughput Performance Analysis of Long Term Evolution Uplink Physical Layer

Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is currently a strong candidate for the uplink multiple access scheme. Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink transmission scheme is based on SC-FDMA with cyclic prefix. SC-FDMA signals have more robust against phase noise and better peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) properties compared to an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) signal. This was one of the main reasons for selecting SC-FDMA. The single carrier transmission performance degrades due to a severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). Equalization techniques are used in the receiver in order to combat the ISI. The interfering symbols can be subtracted from the transmitted bits with precoding techniques. By using frequency-domain precoding, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the single carrier transmission can be significantly improved. This paper presents the basic structure of the LTE uplink transmission, frequency-domain implementation of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) for uplink SC-FDMA as well as the results showing BER and throughput performance for AWGN channel.