To transmit a multi-carrier signal, a transmitter provides zero symbols for guard subbands, performs OFDM modulation, and filters the resultant time-domain samples with a pulse shaping filter. To transmit a single-carrier signal, the transmitter partitions the single-carrier signal into segments. Each segment contains up to K samples and is padded, if needed, to the length of an OFDM symbol. Each padded segment is transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain to generate a corresponding frequency-domain segment with K symbols. For each frequency-domain segment, the symbols corresponding to the guard subbands are set to zero. Each frequency-domain segment is then transformed from the frequency domain to the time domain to generate a corresponding time-domain segment. A cyclic prefix may or may not be appended to each time-domain segment. Each time-domain segment is filtered with the same pulse shaping filter to generate an output waveform for the single-carrier signal.