Single- and multi-carrier IDMA schemes with cyclic prefixing and zero padding techniques

In this paper, we investigate single-carrier (SC) and multi-carrier IDMA schemes with cyclic prefixing (CP) and zero padding (ZP) techniques. These schemes are called SC-IDMA-CP, SC-IDMA-ZP, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-IDMA-CP and OFDM-IDMA-ZP, respectively. By exploiting the circulant property of channel matrices, the multi-user detection of these schemes can be efficiently realised with per-user complexity independent of the number of users and the length of inter-symbol interference (ISI) channels. We show the potential advantages of ZP-based schemes in power efficiency and convergence speed. Simulation results are provided to compare the four schemes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.