Performance evaluation of OFDMA and multicarrier CDMA systems on airport surface area channels

To meet increasing communication demands on airport surface areas, several systems have been proposed. The OFDMA based IEEE 802.16e system and other multicarrier systems such as multicarrier code division multiple access (MC- CDMA) are of great interest, since they provide flexible data rates and good system performance. In this paper, the performance of several multi-carrier transmission schemes, including OFDMA, spread spectrum multi-carrier multiple access (SS-MC- MA), and frequency generalized multi-carrier CDMA (FG-MC-CDMA), are evaluated on airport surface area channels. All multicarrier spread spectrum systems considered here can be implemented on a common platform and together provide a large amount of flexibility in user data rates, system throughput, performance, and complexity. Moreover, adaptive subcarrier- allocation is not required for these systems, which can greatly reduce system complexity compared to an AMC-OFDMA system.