Performance evaluation of DFT/DCT/DST-based SC-FDMA systems in the presence of CFOs for wireless images transmission

Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) has become increasingly popular in broadband data transmission systems due to its many advantages. One of the main advantages is the lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which significantly benefits the mobile terminal station in terms of transmit power efficiency. However, SC-FDMA is susceptible to carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) which affect the orthogonality between subcarriers and cause inter-carrier interference (ICI) and multiple access interference (MAI). In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the performance of SC-FDMA in the presence of CFOs for wireless image transmission with different basis functions, different subcarrier mapping techniques, and different modulation schemes over vehicular A and SUI3 channel models. This study focuses on evaluating the performance of SC-FDMA using wireless image transmission. The evaluation is conducted based on two performance metrics, namely peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE). Specifically, we consider the following three cases: the no CFOs case, the case when CFOs are present but without compensation, and the case when CFOs are present and CFO compensation is used. The CFO compensation technique used in this work is the joint mean minimum squared error (JMMSE) method. The results showed that JMMSE with DFT can provide better performance in the presence of CFOs compared to DCT and DST. Additionally, the choice of interleaved subcarrier mapping technique provides better performance compared to localized subcarrier mapping. Furthermore, the impact of the modulation scheme and the channel model on system performance is also evaluated, with the results showing that QPSK is more robust to CFOs compared to 16QAM modulation and the performance is better transmitting over the SU13 model rather than the vehicular A channel model. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of JMMSE combined with DFT and interleaved subcarrier mapping in mitigating the effects of CFOs and multipath channels, especially with the SUI3 channel model and QPSK modulation.