Performance analysis of the OFDM-IDMA system with carrier frequency offset in a fast fading multipath channel

The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing-Interleave Division Multiple Access (OFDM-IDMA) scheme, which offers significant improvement on the performance of the conventional IDMA technique, has been in the forefront of recent mobile communication researches as it is expected to deliver a high quality, flexible and efficient high data-rate mobile transmission. Most papers on OFDM-IDMA scheme assume a system free of carrier frequency offset. However, the scheme is susceptible to synchronization errors and performance degradation because of the presence of OFDM, which is highly sensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO) especially at the uplink. The effect of CFO on the performance of the scheme, in a slow fading multipath channel scenario, is therefore investigated, and analyzed. In addition, the effect of CFO on the performance of the OFDMIDMA scheme, in a fast fading multipath channel, which has not been hitherto reported in literature, is investigated and analyzed. Simulation results clearly show that the presence of CFO degrades the performance of the system. Furthermore, results show that system performance degradation due to CFO, increases in a fast fading multipath channel in comparison with slow fading channel scenario.