An investigative study of cyclic prefix-free MC-CDMA arrayed-MIMO communication systems

An arrayed-MIMO communication system, which employs antenna arrays at both ends of the wireless link, is proposed to leverage upon spatial information such as directions-of-arrival for achieving an improvement in performance. This is in contrast with conventional MIMO systems, which typically assume multiple independent antenna elements at the transmitters and receivers. This paper focuses on an arrayed-MIMO communication system operating over a frequency-selective fading channel and employs MC-CDMA as the modulation scheme. However, in a departure from conventional MC-CDMA systems, cyclic prefixes or guard intervals are not used for the MC-CDMA system employed here so that valuable bandwidth is not wasted on cyclic prefixes or guard intervals. The feasibility of the proposed system is supported by simulation results.