Space-Time Block Coding for Uplink Single-Carrier CDMA with Joint Detection in the Frequency Domain

Single-carrier code-division multiple access (SC-CDMA), also named cyclic-prefix CDMA in the literature, is a promising air interface for the uplink of the 4G cellular wireless communication systems. It enables the high capacity intrinsically offered by CDMA by making the equalization of the multipath channels and the mitigation of the resulting interference possible at a low complexity. This paper proposes a new air interface that combines SC-CDMA with space-time block coding (STBC) across multiple transmit antennas in order to make the link more robust. Contrary to existing air interfaces that perform the STBC at the chip level, making them only applicable to the downlink, the STBC is performed at the symbol level, making it also applicable to the uplink. In order to optimally detect the different antenna and user signals, a linear joint detector optimized according to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion is designed. By exploiting the cyclic properties of the channel matrices, the complexity of the joint detector is significantly reduced. Furthermore, it is shown analytically that the inter-antenna interference is canceled out at the output of the first stage of the linear MMSE joint detector, consisting of a matched filter. By space-time coding the signal through two antennas at each transmit mobile terminal, a significant gain in signal-to-noise-ratio can be achieved. However, the spatial diversity gain of the proposed system is limited by the multiuser interference (MUI), that is increasing with the user load. Higher complexity non-linear receivers are needed to better compensate the MUI and still benefit from the spatial diversity at high user loads.