Comparison of Single-Carrier FDMA vs. OFDMA as 3GPP Long-Term Evolution Uplink

In order to transition from today’s 3rd generation (3G) communications systems to meet the needs of 4th generation (4G) systems, the 3rd Generation Partnership Partnership (3GPP) has released the Long Term Evolution (LTE) specification. Among the numerous differences between these generations are changes in the physical layer (PHY), specifically in the modulation and multiple access schemes. While its parent generation relied on variations of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), LTE implements Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) for its downlink and Single-Carrier Frequency-Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) for its uplink. The purpose of this project is to investigate the reasoning for this discord between uplink and downlink modulation schemes. The project shall consist of two parts: a literature survey to compare them using relevant works, and a set of simulations to compare them numerically.