Forward link capacity of coherent DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA broadband packet wireless access in a multi-cell environment

This paper investigates wireless access schemes, in the forward link that are suitable for wireless broadband packet transmission in a multi-cell environment. The single-carrier (SC)/DS-CDMA, multi-carrier (MC)/DS-CDMA, and MC-CDMA schemes are compared in terms of packet error rate (PER) performance taking into account the impact of other-cell interference assuming the use of cell-site diversity. The results show that, while SC/DS-CDMA (64 Mcps) and MC/DS-CDMA (number of sub-carriers 4, 16 Mcps per sub-carrier) cannot attain the average PER=10/sup -2/ for more than two users, MC-CDMA (number of sub-carriers=512, 156 ksps per sub-carrier) achieves much better performance and realizes simultaneous transmission of approximately 10 users with antenna diversity reception, when the total bandwidth is 80 MHz and the information bit rate per user is 2 Mbps.