Time-Frequency Compressed FTN Signaling: A Solution to Spectrally Efficient Single-Carrier System

Faster-than-Nyquist signaling (FTNS) is capable of improving the spectral efficiency (SE) of communication systems. However, for conventional single-carrier FTNS (SC-FTNS) in which only symbol interval is reduced, the increase of SE is very limited due to the presence of inter-symbol interference (ISI) introduced by the FTNS. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes a new time-frequency compressed SC-FTNS (TFC-SC-FTNS) scheme that includes the conventional FTNS as a special case, to improve the SE via two dimensions simultaneously: time dimension by stacking symbols closer; frequency dimension by precoding to make the FTN signal spectrum more compact. Further, an optimization subject to a spectral mask constraint is performed on the precoder to suppress the ISI, according to a mean-square-error criterion, but the optimization problem is non-convex. A nontrivial contribution in the new scheme is that the non-convex problem is transformed into a convex one by a change of variable and an addition of admissibility constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the conventional FTNS in terms of achievable SE or, equivalently, reception performance at a given SE. Further, with larger constellations applied, the gains of the TFC-FTNS increase.