Comparative Study of Different Space-Time Coding Schemes for MC-CDMA Systems

In this paper, performance of space-time trellis-code (STTC), space-time block code (STBC), and space-time trellis-code concatenated with space-time block code (STTC-STBC) for multi-carrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system are studied. These schemes are considered by employing different detection techniques with various multi input multi output (MIMO) antenna diversity for different number of states in multi-path fading channel. The corresponding bit error rate (BER) is obtained using simulation for minimum mean-square error (MMSE), maximum-ratio combining (MRC), and equal-gain combining (EGC) receivers employing Viterbi decoder. The simulation results show that the STTC-STBC MC-CDMA system perform better compared to other schemes considered in this paper using MMSE detection and it is also observed that the performance can also be enhanced by increasing diversity using more transmitter and receiver antennas. However, this improvement in performance comes at the cost of increased computational complexity, which is calculated for different transmitting and receiving antennas.