Abstract Orthogonal wavelets enclose more potential of dropping the ISI- and ICI-sway amid the carriers due to multipath propagation over the free-space fading channels. Moreover, wavelet-OFDM is more bandwidth efficient as compared to conventional OFDM and is less affected by Doppler shift. Accordingly, a BER estimation of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) based OFDM system and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based OFDM system is carried out in this work. The assessment is demonstrated by means of diverse modulation schemes explicitly BPSK, QPSK, 8-PSK, QAM, 8-QAM, 16-QAM for both conventional- and wavelet-OFDM wireless system over AWGN channels. Higher orders of PSK schemes involve more SNR requirement to target an acceptable BER of 10 −5 over AWGN channels in both the cases. Furthermore, the efficiency of W-OFDM increases with decreasing the required value of BER.