Performance of MC CDMA RAKE systems in generalized Nakagami-m multipath fading channel

The performance of a multicarrier direct sequence code division multiple access (MC-DS-CDMA) system in the generalized Nakagami-m multipath fading channel is studied. A RAKE receiver is deployed for each subcarrier to provide path diversity with maximum ratio combining, MRC, applied. A closed form numerical integration is derived for the bit error rate, BER, system performance. Numerical results are obtained for different system parameters, e.g., the fading parameter, m, and the number of RAKE fingers. A comparison is made among different possible systems that might be employed to achieve the same number of resolvable paths for the fading channel.