In recent years, there has been a lot of work on the development of the third generation wireless communication systems. The third generation air interface standardization for schemes based on CDMA has been proposed (cdma2000, W-CDMA), and a globally harmonized CDMA 3G standard is expected. Among the different CDMA schemes, Multi-Carrier CDMA has been proposed as one of the transmission candidates for the downlink. Antenna array is an efficient approach to increase system capacity without allocating additional frequency spectrum. As a result, combining Multi-Carrier CDMA and antenna array has also attracted a lot of research interests and the combined system is a promising candidate for the next generation wireless personal communications systems....[ Read more ]

In recent years, there has been a lot of work on the development of the third generation wireless communication systems. The third generation air interface standardization for schemes based on CDMA has been proposed (cdma2000, W-CDMA), and a globally harmonized CDMA 3G standard is expected. Among the different CDMA schemes, Multi-Carrier CDMA has been proposed as one of the transmission candidates for the downlink. Antenna array is an efficient approach to increase system capacity without allocating additional frequency spectrum. As a result, combining Multi-Carrier CDMA and antenna array has also attracted a lot of research interests and the combined system is a promising candidate for the next generation wireless personal communications systems.

In this thesis, we investigate the system performance of two types of Multi-Carrier CDMA systems. We derive analytical results for the system BERs of an MC-CDMA system employing base station antenna arrays. System BERs with different combining schemes are compared. A detailed performance analysis of the proposed MC-CDMA communication system for a variety of system parameters will also be presented.

Using a time domain approach, we investigate the effect of time delay spread on the performance of MC-DS-CDMA. Semi-analytical and simulation results for the system BERs are presented. We also consider the effect of the number of subcarriers and the carrier frequency offset on the system performance.

Given the importance of the correction of the frequency offset errors in Multi-Carrier systems, we present a Maximal Likelihood (ML) method for the correction of frequency offset for MC-CDMA systems over fading channels. A gradient algorithm, which make the carrier frequency achieves the optimal value automatically, is proposed and simulation results show that system performance can be improved significantly even after a small number of iterations.