Diversity comparison of spreading transforms for multicarrier spread spectrum transmission

Multicarrier spread spectrum transmission methods based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing employ a linear transform to spread energy of transmitted symbols over statistically independent Rayleigh fading subcarriers, in order to enable a diversity gain at the receiver. We jointly treat the mapping from bits into transmit symbols and the spreading transform as a code in Euclidean space. We describe criteria to identify good and bad spreading transforms, in terms of the asymptotic bit-error probability (BEP) at high signal-to-noise ratio. Upper and lower bounds on the BEP are derived. It is shown that the BEP performance of the commonly used Hadamard transform is asymptotically bad. Alternative orthogonal transforms with better asymptotic performance are proposed. Simulation results are given for the example of 2-phase-shift keying, block length 8.