Performance of STBC MC-CDMA systems over outdoor realistic MIMO channels

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of space-time block coded MC-CDMA systems in outdoor realistic MIMO channels, highlighting the benefits of spatial diversity and the effectiveness of Alamouti's scheme for 4G mobile downlink.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of detection and spreading schemes in realistic outdoor MIMO scenarios, emphasizing the advantages of Alamouti's STBC MC-CDMA for future mobile systems.

Findings

Spatial diversity improves MC-CDMA performance

Alamouti's scheme achieves full diversity benefits

System offers a good complexity-performance trade-off

Abstract

The paper deals with orthogonal space-time block coded MC-CDMA systems in outdoor realistic downlink scenarios with up to two transmit and receive antennas. Assuming no channel state information at the transmitter, we compare several linear single-user detection and spreading schemes, with or without channel coding, achieving a spectral efficiency of 1-2 bits/s/Hz. The different results obtained demonstrate that spatial diversity significantly improves the performance of MC-CDMA systems, and allows different chip-mapping without notably decreasing performance. Moreover, the global system exhibits a good trade-off between complexity at mobile stations and performance. Then, Alamouti's STBC MC-CDMA schemes derive full benefit from the frequency and spatial diversities and can be considered as a very realistic and promising candidate for the air interface downlink of the 4/sup th/ generation mobile radio systems.