Performance of space-frequency combining at the antenna array of a MC-CDMA system

In this paper, a multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system employing antenna array at base station with quaternary phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation is proposed. This receiver adopts a space-frequency two-dimensional (2-D) Rake receiver structure. Based on the detailed analysis of the interference characteristics of the proposed system, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the system is provided. With regard to spatial domain combining, the optimum and suboptimum combining weight is derived, while the suboptimum set of weights is simplified on sense of that only the knowledge of array vector of desired user alone is sufficient for the combining. Simulation results verify the analysis and show that better performance is achieved for the proposed antenna array MC-CDMA system than the corresponding single antenna approach.