Comparison of MC-CDMA with DS-CDMA using frequency domain and time domain RAKE receivers

In this paper a multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system with a soft decision differential phase shift keying (DPSK) frequency domain RAKE receiver is described. We compare a MC-CDMA system with a direct sequence CDMA system using RAKE receivers. In contrast with previous MC-CDMA systems, guard intervals are not used and the carriers are spaced at the reciprocal of the bit rate, optimising the usage of the bandwidth. In this way a comparison can be made between the multicarrier CDMA system described and a direct sequence (DS-CDMA) system with the same bandwidth. The results presented are received bit error rates from Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations are conducted in a multipath channel with Rayleigh fading and 300 Hz Doppler spectrum with additive white Gaussian noise. It is shown that the multicarrier CDMA matched filter receiver performs favourably compared to the direct sequence CDMA matched filter receiver for 1 -path fading. For a single user at a receive bit error rate of 1×10^–3 in the 4-path fading channel the multicarrier RAKE receiver requires no knowledge of the channel delay spread and performs 3 dB worse than the DS-CDMA RAKE receiver simulated. The performance of the MC-CDMA RAKE receiver for a single user increases with increasing channel dispersion. The performance of the DS-CDMA RAKE receiver for multiple user is superior to that of the MC-CDMA RAKE receiver.