Performance of Multicarrier

DS CDMA Systems
I. Introduction
Spread spectrum modulation techniques for digital communications were originally
developed and used for military communications either to provide resistance to hostile
jamming, to hide the signal by transmitting it at low power and, thus, making it difficult
for an unintended listener to detect its presence in noise. Today, however, spread
spectrum modulation techniques are being used to provide reliable communications in a
variety of commercial applications.
It was in 1993 that new multiple access schemes based on a combination of code division
multiple access (CDMA) and Multicarrier techniques [1] was proposed, such as
“Multicarrier (MC-) CDMA”, “Multicarrier DS-CDMA”, and “Multitone (MT-)
CDMA”. It combines the advantages of CDMA (such as interference rejection, frequency
reuse etc.,) with the advantages of OFDM (such as robustness against multipath, impulse
noise etc).
With MC-CDMA, a data symbol is transmitted over N narrowband subcarriers
with each subcarrier being encoding with a 0 or π phase offset based on a spreading code.
Different users transmit over the same set of subcarriers but with a spreading cod that is
orthogonal to the codes of other users. The resulting signal has an orthogonal code
structure in the frequency domain. If the number and spacing between subcarriers is
appropriately chosen, all of the subcarriers will not be located in a deep fade.
MC-CDMA systems solve the inter-chip-interference (ICI) problem by
transmitting the same data symbol over a large number of narrowband orthogonal
carriers, without spectrum spreading per carrier, and make it possible for multiple users
to communicate through the same channel. Also these signals can be easily transmitted
and received using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) without increasing the transmitter
and receiver complexities and have the attractive feature of high spectral efficiency due
to minimally densely subcarrier spacing.
In Multicarrier DS-CDMA, the data rate in each subcarrier can be lower so that a
large chip time makes it easier to synchronize the spreading sequences. So this scheme is
originally proposed for an up-link communication channel.
The MT-CDMA scheme uses longer spreading codes in proportion to the number
of subcarriers, as compared with a normal DS-CDMA scheme; therefore, the system can
accommodate more users than the DS-CDMA scheme.
In this project, we focus on MC-CDMA, and evaluate the performance of MC-
CDMA in a variety of channels, such as the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), the
Rayleigh fading, and the Rician fading channel. Applying the central limit theorem, we
derive the average bit error probability with Q-function. And then, we intuitively
compare multicarrier system with single-carrier system depending on the bandwidth and
power of the interference.
This project is organized as follows: section II presents the system model including
transmitter, channels, and receiver. Section III provides the performance of multicarrier
system. Section IV provides comparison to single-carrier system. Section V includes the
numerical results and discussions. Section VI is devoted to conclusions. The motivation
for this project is from the paper, “Performance of Multicarrier DS CDMA Systems” [2].