Performance of carrier frequency offset estimation in MC-CDMA systems over frequency selective fading channels

Multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems are more sensitive to the carrier frequency offset than single-carrier systems. Carrier frequency offset destroys the orthogonality among subcarriers in MC-CDMA systems and degrades the system performance seriously. To mitigate the effect of carrier frequency offset, it should be estimated and compensated before demodulation. A blind MUSIC-like estimation algorithm for MC-CDMA systems is studied in this paper. The MUSIC-like algorithm exploits the inherent orthogonality between information bearing carriers and virtual carriers to estimate the carrier frequency offset. The performance of the estimation is evaluated over frequency-selective fading channels in this paper. From the simulation results, the MUSIC-like estimation algorithm is effective in MC-CDMA systems over frequency-selective fading channels.