Sensitivity of the MC-CDMA access scheme to carrier phase noise and frequency offset

The combination of multicarrier (MC) modulation and code-division multiple access (CDMA) is seen as a very promising technique for the development of high-capacity wireless local communications. On the other hand, this scheme is very sensitive to the signal distortion generated by the imperfect frequency down conversion at the receiver due to the local oscillator phase noise and frequency offset. In this work, we consider the MC-CDMA architecture that was independently proposed in [1] and [2], and, in particular, we evaluate the impact of both the carrier frequency offset and the phase noise on the system performance. The results are given in terms of symbol error rate (SER) obtained by means of an analytical approach for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. However, the procedure can be applied to the performance evaluation in the presence of a multipath fading channel as part of a semianalytical approach. This approach offers a realistic means of performance evaluation when the target error probability values are of the order of 10(-6) or lower.