A Near-Optimal and Low-Complex Joint Multiuser Detection for QCSS-MC-CDMA System

Joint maximum likelihood (ML) multiuser detection for quasi-synchronous multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system has an excessive computational complexity, and it increases exponentially as the number of users and bits in each of the modulation symbols increases. Recently, sphere decoding (SD) has been adopted for multiuser detection whose complexity is polynomial in nature with the number of users, and it does not rely on the number of bits in the modulation. In this article, first we provide a construction of large size quasi-complementary sequence sets (QCSSs), and then a low-complexity optimum SD algorithm is proposed to detect the multiuser communication in QCSS-based MC-CDMA (QCSS-MC-CDMA) system. The complexity analysis has shown that the proposed SD-based QCSS-MC-CDMA receiver for multiuser communication provides lower complexity than that of ML-based QCSS-MC-CDMA receiver. We also show that peak to average power ratio of the proposed system is lesser than that of complete complementary code (CCC) based MC-CDMA (CCC-MC-CDMA) system. The proposed system overcomes the fractional delay problem which is noticed for CCC-MC-CDMA receiver. The bit error rate performance of the proposed SD-based QCSS-MC-CDMA system is compared with maximum ratio combining based MC-CDMA, ML-based MC-CDMA, frequency domain equalization based MC-CDMA, and CCC-MC-CDMA receivers over Rayleigh frequency selective fading channels. The work is validated through Monte Carlo simulation results.