Comparison of multicarrier DS-CDMA broadcast systems in a multipath fading channel

The performance of a multicarrier direct sequence code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system employed in the forward link of a cellular system operating over a Rayleigh fading channel is analyzed and compared to the performance of both single-carrier CDMA and hybrid multicarrier CDMA/frequency division multiplexing systems. A RAKE receiver is provided for each subcarrier. We compare the performance of all three systems for various multipath intensity profiles. It is found that for a service requiring high quality and a small number of users, the multicarrier system is the best, but for a service requiring low quality and a large number of users, the hybrid system can support more users than the others. Also, for the case when nonorthogonal codes are used, the multiple-access interference in different resolvable paths are correlated. In that case, to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in a correlated interference environment; maximal-ratio combining (MRC) is not optimal. However, we found that there is not much difference between the optimum combining and the conventional MRC.