Performance of a coded multi-carrier DS-CDMA system in multi-path fading channels

Multi-carrier DS-CDMA has been considered as an effective scheme for reducing multiple access interference in quasi-synchronous transmission. The scheme allows the reduction of multiple access interference by transferring the orthogonality property of the signals into the frequency domain where the orthogonality property is robust to relative chip offsets between the spreading codes of the various users. However in multi-path channels, the multi-carrier technique results in frequency non-selective fading in the sub-channels, due to the narrower bandwidth, hence a reduction of the capability of the spread spectrum signal to mitigate the effect of multi-path propagation. In this paper, we consider the use of a Reed-Muller code with soft decision decoding to regain the corresponding loss in performance, and compare the resulting system with a single carrier DS-CDMA system. The effect of system parameters such as the number of sub-channels is investigated through numerical calculation and simulation, from which a number of system design criteria are arrived at.