Partial equalization of multi-carrier CDMA in frequency selective fading channels

We consider the detection of multi-carrier-code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) signals in frequency selective fading channels using partial channel equalization. By partially compensating for the fading channel amplitude we can reduce the multi-user interference without considerably enhancing the additive noise level. As a result the MC-CDMA scheme can exploit the frequency diversity of the channel without the need for very complicated detection schemes. The obtained results show considerable performance improvement as compared to that of conventional detection schemes that try to fully compensate for the channel variations. In fact, the performance of this partial channel compensation based detector is not far from that of the optimum minimum mean square error (MMSE) combining detector.