Performance comparison between MC-CDMA and DS-CDMA for broadband wireless transmissions

This article presents a comparison between DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA systems. The objective is to evaluate these two access techniques with similar assumptions (such as bandwidth, radio channel, number of users), and with the same kind of receivers (MRC, sub-optimal and optimal MMSE). A MC-CDMA system can be viewed as a DS-CDMA system that uses complex codes instead of binary ones. Intuitively, we expect to obtain the same level of performance. Using random matrix theory, it is possible to demonstrate that both systems offer the same performance as long as the spreading factor is sufficiently large (SF>16 typically). Simulation results confirm the accuracy of the asymptotic SINR and also that both techniques offer the same performance.