We discuss the spectral efficiency of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals widely adopted in practical systems from a viewpoint of their power spectral density property. Since the conventional OFDM does not make use of pulse shaping filter, its out-of-band (OOB) spectrum may not be negligible especially when the number of subcarriers is small. Thus, in practice, windowing is applied to mitigate OOB emission by smoothing the transition of consecutive OFDM symbols, but its effectiveness has not been well investigated. Furthermore, OFDM signal suffers from nonlinear distortion associated with its high signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which also leads to OOB radiation. We examine how power amplifier nonlinearity affects the spectral efficiency based on the theoretical results developed in the literature.

In this paper, the effect of the impulse response of pulse shaping filters on a fractional sampling orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (FS OFDM) system is investigated. FS achieves path diversity with a single antenna through oversampling and subcarrier-based maximal ratio combining (MRC). Though the oversampling increases diversity order, correlation among noise components may deteriorate bit error rate (BER) performance. To clarify the relationship between the impulse response of the pulse shaping filter and the BER performance, five different pulse shaping filters are evaluated in the FS OFDM system. Numerical results of computer simulations show that the Frobenius norm of a whitening matrix corresponding to the pulse shaping filter has significant effect on the BER performance especially with a small numbers of subcarriers. It is also shown that metric adjustment based on the Frobenius norm improves BER performance of the coded FS OFDM system.

The reverse link bandwidth efficiency of a spectrally overlapped CDMA system with fast transmit power control is evaluated to find the optimum overlapping, where the bandwidth efficiency is defined as the maximum aggregate bit rate of all subsystems per unit bandwidth (bps/Hz). Single and multiple cell environments are considered. Besides the rectangular chip pulse, the impact of a pulse-shaping filter is discussed. It is found that the raised cosine spectrum pulse shaping helps to increase the bandwidth efficiency and strict pulse shaping filter problem can be avoided if a large number of subsystems are overlapped. It is also found that the optimum carrier spacing remains unchanged irrespective of the power delay profile shape of the multipath channel, whether multipath fading exists or not, and whether a single cell or multiple cell system is considered. However, the bandwidth efficiency strongly depends on them and the impacts of the related parameters are discussed.