Performance comparison of coherent and non-coherent multicarrier frequency-hopping code division multiple-access systems

We evaluate and compare the multiuser performance of the multicarrier frequency-hopping (MC-FH) CDMA system using coherent and non-coherent detection in AWGN and slowly frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels in a downlink application. For fair comparison, we use BFSK modulation for both cases. Our numerical results indicate that in both AWGN and fading channels, coherent detection substantially outperforms non-coherent detection. Furthermore, it has been realized that the performance enhancement due to the diversity order is only observable for coherent detection.