Analysis of the antenna array-aided multicarrier DS-CDMA RAKE system with synchronous uplink transmission

A multicarrier (MC) signalling was introduced as a means of reducing the effect of synchronisation offsets in a quasi-synchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) network. The incorporation of an antenna array (AA) into the multicarrier direct sequence (MC DS)-CDMA asynchronous uplink was considered to provide additional interference elimination capability. In addition, a combined AA and synchronous uplink transmission was proposed which results in more efficient estimation of covariance matrix to generate weights in the AA. However, the previous studies have considered each individual target, neglecting the comprehensive analysis of the system performances. Furthermore, the effects of diversity orders such as the number of branches in the RAKE receiver as well as the number of subcarriers transmitting the same data in the MC transmission have not been investigated. Against the background, the novel contribution of the study is that the performance of the AA-aided uplink synchronous MC DS-CDMA RAKE system is analysed under multipath Rayleigh fading channels in the context of the various shapes of multipath intensity profile (MIP) and the number of antenna elements. The resultant bit error rate performance and user capacity are compared to those of the corresponding AA-aided asynchronous uplink.