  Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and single-carrier
frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) are two commonly adopted modulation
schemes for frequency-selective channels. Compared to SC-FDE, OFDM generally
achieves higher data rate, but at the cost of higher transmit signal
peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) that leads to lower power amplifier
efficiency. This paper proposes a new modulation scheme, called flexible
multi-group single-carrier (FMG-SC), which encapsulates both OFDM and SC-FDE as
special cases, thus achieving more flexible rate-PAPR trade-offs between them.
Specifically, a set of frequency subcarriers are flexibly divided into
orthogonal groups based on their channel gains, and SC-FDE is applied over each
of the groups to send different data streams in parallel. We aim to maximize
the achievable sum-rate of all groups by optimizing the subcarrier-group
mapping. We propose two low-complexity subcarrier grouping methods and show via
simulation that they perform very close to the optimal grouping by exhaustive
search. Simulation results also show the effectiveness of the proposed FMG-SC
modulation scheme with optimized subcarrier grouping in improving the rate-PAPR
trade-off over conventional OFDM and SC-FDE.
