Performance comparison of MRC and EGC on a MC-CDMA system with synchronization errors over fading channels

This work derives the average bit error rate (BER) of the uplink and downlink multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems using maximum ratio combining (MRC) and equal gain combining (EGC) with synchronization errors over fading channels. The derived equation can simultaneously incorporate the parameters of the fading channel and all of the synchronization errors, including frequency offset, carrier phase jitter, and timing jitter. Numerical results indicate that those two combining schemes on the uplink and downlink MC-CDMA systems are degraded by all of the normalized synchronization errors over 10−2. The comparison outcomes between MRC and EGC reveal that the MRC generally outperforms EGC in the uplink MC-CDMA system. However, EGC achieves better performance when the number of users is small, the normalized synchronization errors are low and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is high. In the downlink system, EGC mainly outperforms MRC when the SNR and the number of users are gradually increased and the normalized synchronization errors are low. Therefore, the selection of MRC or EGC depends on the SNR, the synchronization errors and the number of users in uplink and downlink MC-CDMA systems.