Single-Carrier Waveform Design
Assessing single-carrier transmission as a low-complexity option for high-frequency beyond-5G links.
Why revisit single carrier
BRAVE is a collaborative research project started in January 2018 that aims at creating new physical-layer (PHY) techniques devoted to beyond-5G wireless communications. Within this effort, single-carrier waveforms are examined as an alternative to multicarrier designs for high-frequency operation.
Single-carrier signals avoid several peak-power and phase-noise penalties that multicarrier signals suffer from, which matters when amplifiers and oscillators are the limiting components.
Side note: the waveform question cannot be answered without the amplifier and oscillator models that will run in the target band.
Single carrier and multicarrier
Peak power behaviour
Single-carrier signals typically show a lower peak-to-average power ratio, which relaxes the linearity demands on the power amplifier.
Equalisation effort
Frequency-domain equalisation keeps receiver complexity manageable even when the channel is dispersive, so the trade-off is studied case by case.
- Lower peak-to-average power ratio
- Reduced sensitivity to phase noise in many settings
- Receiver complexity assessed under realistic channels
Evaluation approach
Step 1
Hardware-aware modelling
Amplifier and oscillator models are fixed before waveform comparisons begin.
Step 2
Link-level simulation
Candidate waveforms are compared on error rate, throughput and receiver effort.
Step 3
Trade-off report
Results are summarised so that the choice can be traced back to explicit assumptions.
Simulation and bench views
Questions on waveform design
Not necessarily. The project compares both families under the same conditions and reports where each one performs better.
All candidates share the same hardware models, channel realisations and performance metrics.
Related work: sub-THz physical layer and usage scenarios. Peer-reviewed outputs are listed on publications.