Combination of Array Processing and Space-Time Coding In MC-CDMA System

The transmission capacity of wireless communication systems may become dramatically high by employ multiple transmit and receive antennas with space-time coding techniques appropriate to multiple transmit antennas. For large number of transmit antennas and at high bandwidth efficiencies, the receiver may become too complex whenever correlation across transmit antennas is introduced. Reducing decoding complexity at receiver by combining array processing and space-time codes (STC) helps a communication system using STC to overcome the big obstacle that prevents it from achieving a desired high transmission rate. Multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) allows providing good performance in a channel with high inter-symbol interference. Antenna array, STC and MC-CDMA system have a similar characteristic that transmit-receive data streams are divided into sub-streams. Thus, there may be a noticeable reduction of receiver complexity when we combine them together. In this paper, the combination of array processing and STC in MC-CDMA system over slow selective-fading channel is investigated and compared with corresponding existing MC-CDMA system using STC. A refinement of this basic structure leads to a system design principle in which we have to make a trade off between transmission rate, decoding complexity, and length of spreading code to reach a given desired design goal.