Comparison of Achievable Rates of OFDM and Single Carrier Communication Systems

This paper presents a theoretical comparison of a single carrier system and a multi-carrier system through an analysis of the achievable rate under frequency selective fading with channel state information at the receiver. A scheme was designed to compare the achievable rates of a single carrier system and an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. A thorough theoretical analysis of the two-path channel was conducted, and simulations were also used to analyze practical stochastic channels. Analysis and simulation results show that the achievable rates of the two approaches are comparable when the channel is flat fading. However, when the channel is frequency selective fading, the single carrier system outperforms the OFDM system. The achievable rate of the OFDM system is about 10% lower than that of the single carrier system at higher SNRs.