Advanced modulation schemes for an Antarctic Long Haul HF Link: Performance comparison between SC-FDE, OFDMA and SC-FDMA in a hostile environment

This paper presents the comparison of the BER performance between SC-FDE, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDMA) and single-carrier frequency division multiplexing access (SC-FDMA) in a long haul HF data link with low SNR. The goal of the comparison is to define two operation modes for two QoS; a robust mode and a high throughput mode, in order to transmit data from remote sensors in Antarctica through a 12760 km ionospheric link with a power amplifier of only 200 W. Clipping and amplification of the waveforms have been applied to SC-FDMA and OFDMA in order to compensate the PAPR and therefore maximize the SNR. The Antarctic HF link has been studied for 11 years, and we have described the link in terms of availability, SNR, delay and Doppler profile, and also spread spectrum techniques have been tested for data transmission. Based on those previous studies results we have developed a test bed to compare these transmission techniques, providing promising results in our low power ionospheric link from Antarctica.