Optimal blockwise subcarrier allocation policies in single-carrier FDMA uplink systems

In this paper, we analyze the optimal (blockwise) subcarrier allocation schemes in single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) uplink systems without channel state information at the transmitter side. The presence of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in SC-FDMA/orthogonal frequency division multiple access OFDMA systems induces correlation between subcarriers which degrades the transmission performance, and thus, only some of the possible subcarrier allocation schemes achieve better performance. We propose as a performance metric a novel sum-correlation metric which is shown to exhibit interesting properties and a close link with the outage probability. We provide the set of optimal block-sizes achieving the maximum diversity and minimizing the inter-carrier sum-correlation function. We derive the analytical closed-form expression of the largest optimal block-size as a function of the system’s parameters: number of subcarriers, number of users, and the cyclic prefix length. The minimum value of sum-correlation depends only on the number of subcarriers, number of users and on the variance of the channel impulse response. Moreover, we observe numerically a close strong connection between the proposed metric and diversity: the optimal block-size is also optimal in terms of outage probability. Also, when the considered system undergoes carrier frequency offset (CFO), we observe the robustness of the proposed blockwise allocation policy to the CFO effects. Numerical Monte Carlo simulations which validate our analysis are illustrated.