On the performance of MC-CDMA systems with partial combining and multiple antennas in fading channels

In this paper we analytically evaluate the downlink performance of a multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system by employing partial combining when multiple antennas at the transmitter or it the receiver are considered. It is known that for single reception/transmission, the partial combining technique depends on a parameter which can be optimized as a function of the number of subcarrier, the number of active users and the SNR improving the performance with respect to other classical techniques (such as maximal ratio combining, equal gain combining. or orthogonality restoring combining). In this paper we extend the analysis considering also multiple antennas aiming at showing how the spatial diversity affects the performance as a function of the partial combining parameter.