Design and performance of multicarrier CDMA system in frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels

This paper presents the advantages and disadvantages of a multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system. The transmitter/receiver structure and, the bandwidth of transmitted signal spectrum are compared with those of a conventional direct-sequence (DS) CDMA system, and an MC-CDMA design method, how to determine the number of subcarriers and the length of guard interval is discussed. The bit error rate (BER) lower bounds for DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA systems are derived and their equivalence is theoretically demonstrated. Finally, the BER performance in downlink and uplink channels with frequency-selective Rayleigh fading is shown by computer simulation.