The performance of multicarrier CDMA for the correlated Rayleigh fading channel

We present an new method for the analytical calculation of the error probability in a Rayleigh fading channel with correlated fading amplitudes. Even though the method can be applied for more general problems, we restrict ourselves on the investigation of a multicarrier CDMA transmission. The frequency correlation between the fading amplitudes of the carriers is given by the delay power spectrum of the channel. We generalize the well-known analytical expressions for the pairwise error probability of the uncorrelated Rayleigh channel to this case of correlated fading. This probability can be expressed in a closed form by an integral over a finite interval which can be easily evaluated numerically. We present some examples to show how much of the diversity of a code remains useful if the transmission channel does not provide an arbitrary degree of diversity.