An analysis of the effect of chip timing jitter in MC-CDMA systems

We investigate the effect of chip synchronization error (or chip timing jitter) in a multicarrier-code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) scheme. The chip timing jitter is modeled by a stationary random process with a known statistic, and the error produced by the jitter is reduced to an additive source of noise. This decomposition is useful because it allows for the use of analytical methods for the computation of the error probability. First, the analysis has been applied to the simple Gaussian channel; afterwards, it has been extended to a multipath fading channel typical of large indoor areas. Use of a semi-analytical approach has been the key factor in obtaining reliable results at moderate computational complexity.