Error Probability Analysis of Interleaved SC-FDMA Systems Over Nakagami-m Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

In this paper, we present an analytical study of the average bit error probability (ABEP) for interleaved single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) systems over independent but not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels with fading parameters {m} being integers when either zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) frequency-domain equalization (FDE) is applied. Under the assumption of independence among channel frequency responses (CFRs) at the allocated subcarriers for a specific user, accurate and closed-form numerical ABEP computations of the generalized hierarchical M-ary pulse amplitude and square/rectangular M-ary quadrature amplitude modulations for both ZF-FDE and MMSE-FDE are developed by exploiting the derived statistics of the equalized noise, including the probability density function and cumulative distribution function. More importantly, the ABEP derivation is based on the real distribution of the CFRs without applying the widely used Nakagami-m approximation of the CFRs in previous literature, resulting in a more accurate ABEP analysis.