Performance Investigation of Space-Time Block Coded Multicarrier DS-CDMA in Time-Varying Channels

In this letter, we evaluate the system performance of a space-time block coded (STBC) multicarrier (MC) DS-CDMA system over a time selective fading channel, with imperfect channel knowledge. The average bit error rate impairment due to imperfect channel information is investigated by taking into account the effect of the STBC position. We consider two schemes: STBC after spreading and STBC before spreading in the MC DS-CDMA system. In the scheme with STBC after spreading, STBC is performed at the chip level; in the scheme with STBC before spreading, STBC is performed at the symbol level. We found that these two schemes have various channel estimation errors, and that the system with STBC before spreading is more sensitive to channel estimation than the system with STBC after spreading. Furthermore, derived results prove that a high spreading factor (SF) in the MC DS-CDMA system with STBC before spreading leads to high channel estimation error, whereas for a system with STBC after spreading this statement is not true.