SUMMARYA framework for a computationally efficient single‐carrier frequency‐division multiple access (SC‐FDMA) transmitter is proposed in this paper. Compared with a wide system bandwidth, the uplink allocation for each user is supposed to be relatively small because of multiple user access, which makes each user's signal vector to be sparse. When the localized subcarrier allocation is used for SC‐FDMA, the inverse fast fourier transform can take advantage of the sparse user input vector to reduce its complexity. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed framework can provide a significant complexity reduction compared with the conventional SC‐FDMA transmitter. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.