About the diversity in cyclic prefixed single-carrier systems

This paper analyzes to what extent the multipath diversity is extracted by a cyclic prefixed single-carrier (CPSC) transmission. The state-of-the-art is currently pessimistic on that issue, and has to be moderated: if it is true that the asymptotical, i.e. at infinite signal to noise ratio (SNR), diversity order achieved by CPSC is equal to one, we prove that the block size has an influence on the performance at moderate SNR. In particular, for reasonably large values of the block size, we show that the multipath diversity can be extracted by CPSC for the range of bit error rate values typically used in practice. The influence of suboptimal linear receivers on the diversity extraction is also investigated.