Certain aspects of the present disclosure relate to communication systems, and more particularly, to single-carrier waveform generation for transmission. An exemplary method generally includes concatenating a first sequence of data samples with samples of a known sequence to generate a first series of samples, performing a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) on the first series of samples to generate a first series of frequency-domain samples, mapping the first series of frequency-domain samples and first zero values to first tones of a system bandwidth, performing an inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) on the mapped first series of frequency-domain samples and the mapped first zero values to generate first time-domain samples of a first orthogonal frequency domain multiplexing (OFDM) symbol, and transmitting the first OFDM symbol as a single-carrier waveform in a first period.