Cellular MIMO Channel Capacities of MC-CDMA and OFDM

Multicarrier transmission techniques (i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA)) are the promising candidates for wireless access technique in future cellular communication systems because of their capability to eliminate the multipath interference. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-space division multiplexing (SDM) can increase the transmission rate without bandwidth expansion. A combination of multi-carrier technique and MIMO is a promising technique. However, the transmission performance of MC-CDMA severely degrades because of the inter-code interference (ICI) arising from the orthogonality distortion owing to the frequency- selective fading. In this paper, we derive the channel capacity formula for MC-CDMA MIMO taking into account the ICI and co-channel interference (CCI) in a cellular environment. Many ICI cancellers have been proposed. The cellular channel capacity of MC-CDMA MIMO with perfect ICI cancellation is numerically evaluated and is compared to that of OFDM MIMO in a cellular environment. The impacts of the frequency-reuse factor and the number of propagation paths are also discussed. The numerical computation results show that the cellular channel capacity of MC-CDMA is larger than that of OFDM.