Exploitation of Diversity in MC-CDMA Systems

MC-CDMA has an additional degree of freedom to exploit diversity compared to OFDMA or MC-TDMA due to spreading. This paper analyzes the achievable BER lower bounds for different MC-CDMA schemes exploiting channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, the receiver, or both. Using channel knowledge at both sides is referred to as combined-equalization. Different design criteria for single-user combined-equalization are investigated and the corresponding lower bounds are derived. It is shown that the new lower bounds for combined-equalization outperform the known lower bounds for MC-CDMA systems which exploit CSI only at the transmitter or receiver.