Abstract: | Multi‐carrier technologies in general, and OFDM and MC‐CDMA in particular, are quickly becoming an integral part of the wireless landscape. In this first of a two‐part survey, the authors present the innovative transmit/receive multi‐carrier implementation of TDMA and DS‐CDMA systems. Specifically, at the transmit side, the pulse shape (in TDMA) and the chip shape (in DS‐CDMA) corresponds to a linear combining of in‐phase harmonics (called a CI signal). At the receiver side, traditional time‐domain processing (equalization in TDMA and RAKE reception in DS‐CDMA) is replaced by innovative frequency based processing. Here, receivers decompose pulse (or chip) shapes into carrier subcomponents and recombine these in a manner achieving both high frequency diversity gain and low MAI. The resulting system outperforms traditional TDMA and DS‐CDMA systems by 10–14 dB at typical BERs, and, by application of pseudo‐orthogonal pulse shapes (chip shapes), is able to double system throughput while maintaining performance gains of up to 8 dB. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |