QR Decomposition-Based Cyclic Prefixed Single-Carrier Transmissions for Cooperative Communications: Concepts and Research Landscape

As an alternative transmission scheme to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), cyclic prefixed single-carrier (CP-SC) transmissions have been widely adopted to overcome the shortcomings of OFDM. How to exploit the achievable full diversity in frequency selective fading channels is the key question in applying CP-SC-based transmissions. Thus, in this tutorial, we focus on recent research in the areas related to CP-SC transmissions for cooperative wireless systems. After explaining the basic concept and operation of CP-SC transmissions, we introduce various types of diversity that are achievable by CP-SC transmissions. To achieve these types of diversity, it is necessary to employ QR decomposition (QRD)-M-based data detection in the receiver. To verify the benefits of CP-SC transmissions in terms of diversity gain, we exemplify various wireless systems for relaying, spectrum sharing, physical layer security, and distributed cyclic delay diversity, and provide link-level simulations. Especially, as alternative metrics of reliability, which is one of the key features of 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) systems, we evaluate the average symbol error rate and outage probability. Finally, we discuss potential research directions involving CP-SC transmissions in emerging wireless communication systems.