What is OFDMA and how it works?

LTE uses OFDM as the basic signal format – OFDMA in the downlink and SC-FDMA in the uplink with various modulation formats. OFDM forms the basic signal format used within 4G LTE.

OFDMA follows a set of rules created for the transmission of data between more than one terminal (any device at the end of a transmission channel, such as a computer or phone) over a transmission medium (such as a wireless network). An example of how OFDMA works is when two phones send data over the same phone line.

OFDMA is the multi-user variant of the OFDM scheme where multiple access is achieved by assigning subsets of time-frequency resources to different users, allowing simultaneous data transmission from several users .