Capacity improvement of a MC-CDMA cellular system with antenna arrays in a fading channel

The MC-CDMA (multi-carrier code division multiple access) technique is known to be appropriate for high data-rate wireless communications such as mobile multimedia communication due to its robustness to multipath fading and its capability of handling high data rates with a simple one-tap equalizer. In this paper, the performance of MC-CDMA cellular system employing antenna arrays at the base station in a fading channel environment is presented. It is shown that the interference from other users within the cell can be significantly reduced for both reverse link (mobile to base station) and forward link (base station to mobile) using a MC-CDMA with antenna arrays, thus increasing the system's user-capacity. Computer simulations that demonstrate user-capacity improvement of the proposed approach are discussed.