Abstract—In this paper we present an initial performance

evaluation of the 3GPP UTRA Long Term Evolution (UTRA

LTE) uplink with baseline settings. The performance results

are obtained from a detailed UTRA LTE uplink link level

simulator supporting OFDMA and SC-FDMA schemes. The basic

transmission scheme for uplink direction is based on singlecarrier

transmission in the form of DFT Spread OFDM with

an MMSE receiver. Two antenna configurations, SISO and 1x2

SIMO are considered in the analysis of spectral efficiency in

addition to Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) and L1-

HARQ. For assessment purposes, the performance results of

SC-FDMA are compared with OFDMA. It is shown that 1x2

SIMO greatly increases the spectral efficiency of SC-FDMA

making it comparable to OFDMA, especially for high coding

rate. Furthermore, SC-FDMA has a flexibility to increase BLER

performance by exploiting frequency diversity.