Performance of MC-CDMA systems in non-independent Rayleigh fading

In this paper, the average bit error probability of an uplink multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system using maximal-ratio combiner (MRC) is derived for a frequency-selective slow fading channel. In contrast to a conventional multicarrier channel model in which the subcarriers experience independent subchannels, the subcarriers in MC-CDMA system undergo the correlated fading channel in a general tapped-delay line (TDL) model with variable channel parameters. Numerical results are shown based on the derived result, to show that conventional multicarrier channels tend to overemphasize the performance of an MC-CDMA system