Performance of orthogonal multicarrier CDMA in a multipath fading channel

A new multicarrier direct sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system is proposed. Transmitted data bits are serial to parallel converted to a number of parallel branches. On each branch each bit is direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS-SS) modulated and transmitted using orthogonal carriers. This procedure provides the following advantages: the transmission bandwidth is more efficiently utilized, the effect of frequency selective multipath interference can be mitigated, and frequency/time diversity is achieved. The system is analyzed with both a conventional matched-filter (MF) receiver and a RAKE receiver for each carrier. The performance is compared to that of the conventional single carrier system with RAKE receiver. It is shown that the multicarrier system is able to out-perform the RAKE receiver when the system parameters are selected properly