An overview of multi-carrier CDMA

We review new multiple access schemes based on a combination of code division and multi-carrier (also known as OFDM: orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) techniques, such as multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA), multicarrier DS-CDMA and multitone CDMA (MT-CDMA). We discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and present some computer simulation results on the down-link bit error rate (BER) performance in a frequency selective slow Rayleigh fading channel. Code division and OFDM based multiple access schemes have drawn a lot of attention in the field of wireless personal and multimedia communications because of the need to transmit at a high data rate in a mobile environment.