Comparison of OFDM and Single-Carrier for Large-Scale Antenna Systems

Abstract: Large-scale antenna (LSA) or massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has gained a lot of attention due to its potential to significantly improve system throughput. As a natural evolution from traditional MIMO-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), LSA has been combined with OFDM to deal with frequency selectivity of wireless channels in most existing works. As an alternative approach, single-carrier (SC) has also been proposed for LSA systems due to its low implementation complexity. In this article, a comprehensive comparison between LSA-OFDM and LSA-SC is presented, which is of interest to the waveform design for the next generation wireless systems.