Enhanced per-carrier processing for MC-CDMA downlink

This paper presents an enhanced per-carrier receiver for multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) downlinks. Traditionally, channel equalization and despreading are considered separately in simple per-carrier MC-CDMA receivers. As will be shown, this approach with commonly deployed mean squared error (MSE) equalizer design results in drastic attenuation of the desired signal term, especially with moderate loadings and high-order modulations. To alleviate this effect, a more advanced reception scheme is developed providing clearly better performance than the traditional solutions, without any notable increase in the receiver complexity. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed approach in case of Rayleigh fading subchannels.