Analysis of single-carrier communication systems

This chapter discusses some of the fundamental concepts related to single-carrier communication. It focuses on the practical aspects of the implementation, analysis, and performance measurement of single-carrier systems. The chapter describes a single-carrier communication system in additive white Gaussian noise channel. Sample clock error is one of the most critical impairments in the model and the one that is described next (flat fading multipath channel). When the transmitted signal passes through a multipath radio channel where the relative path delays are on the order of a symbol period or more, then images of different symbols arrive at the same time. The dispersive channel, which is often referred as frequency selective channel, can be modeled as a linear, finite impulse response filter. A similar system model that is used for narrowband systems in dispersive channels can be used for direct spread code division multiple access systems.