Performance analysis of convolutionally coded multicarrier DS/CDMA system in Nakagami fading

In this paper, we present the performance of a multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system when the data is convolutionally coded before serial-to-parallel conversion. The bit error rate (BER) bound for the decoding metric using the Viterbi algorithm is derived. Two types of performance bounds for the coded system are compared with the uncoded system with respect to bandwidth, bit rate and modulation. Our results indicate that the performance of MC-CDMA is significantly improved when channel coding is applied for the two bounds.