Effects of the parameters on the performance of a multi-carrier CDMA system in fading channel

In this paper, we consider a multicarrier-code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system that combines the direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) technique with MC modulation. The receiver provides a correlator for each carrier, and the outputs of the correlators are combined with an equal-gain combiner. We show the effects of the parameters that include the consideration of several selective fading channels, the number of subcarriers, the chip rate and the signal-to-noise ratio on the performance of the MC-CDMA system. We also compare the system performance with that of a single-carrier RAKE system. It is shown that the MC system is able to outperform the RAKE receiver when the system parameters are selected properly.