Abstract: | In this paper, a novel MIMO‐OFDM transmission scheme is developed to effectively enable multi‐access by joint code design across multiple antennas, subcarriers, OFDM frames, and users. It achieves better spectrum efficiency while improving bit error rate performance. The proposed scheme uses either parity bit selected or permutation techniques to assign spreading codes at the transmitter side. As a result, the detection at the receiver is greatly improved because of the fact that identifying the spreading code(s) directly yields the transmitted data symbols. The paper also investigates the field‐programmable gate array implementation of the proposed algorithms; optimization techniques are proposed to reduce area, power, and time. These techniques include a pipelined architecture for inverse FFT/FFT blocks, an efficient low complexity algorithm for despreading based on counters and comparators and an optimized architecture for complex matrix inversion using Gauss–Jordan elimination (GJ‐elimination). Finally, the fixed‐point optimized field‐programmable gate array architecture for MIMO‐OFDM transceiver is developed, where the maximum allowed performance loss because of quantization is defined, the tradeoffs between BER performance and area reduction are investigated. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |