Comparison of the Achievable Rates in OFDM and Single Carrier Modulation with I.I.D. Inputs

Abstract: We compare the maximum achievable rates in single-carrier and OFDM modulation schemes, under the practical assumptions of i.i.d. finite alphabet inputs and linear ISI with additive Gaussian noise. We show that the Shamai-Laroia approximation serves as a bridge between the two rates: while it is well known that this approximation is often a lower bound on the single-carrier achievable rate, it is revealed to also essentially upper bound the OFDM achievable rate. We apply Information-Estimation relations in order to rigorously establish this result for both general input distributions and to sharpen it for commonly used PAM and QAM constellations. To this end, novel bounds on MMSE estimation of PAM inputs to a scalar Gaussian channel are derived, which may be of general interest. Our results show that, under reasonable assumptions, optimal single-carrier schemes may offer spectral efficiency significantly superior to that of OFDM, motivating further research of such systems.