DFT spread OFDMA popularly known as Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SCFDMA) is an emerging wireless standard and has received considerable attention because of its ability to incorporate advantages of single carrier modulation with OFDMA. Even though SCFDMA has low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and resistance to frequency nulls of the channel, it inherits some drawbacks from OFDMA. Frequency synchronization between transmitter and receiver in mobile environment and resulting performance degradation is one such issue especially in uplink communication.
After the standardization of SCFDMA as uplink standard for LTE, frequency synchronization is an active area of research. In this paper SCFDMA system is analysed in the presence of CFO and the results of analysis is utilized in framing an efficient representation to the multidimensional frequency synchronization problem as effective ICI matrix and a method to jointly compensate effective ICI matrix and equalize the channel is proposed based on minimum mean square error criterion and its performance is compared with the existing schemes.