Comparison of downlink and uplink MC-DS-CDMA sensitivity to carrier frequency offsets

We study the sensitivity of uplink and downlink MC-DS-CDMA to carrier frequency offsets, assuming orthogonal spreading sequences. For both uplink and downlink MC-DS-CDMA, we show that the performance rapidly degrades for an increasing ratio of maximum frequency offset to carrier spacing. We point out that the degradation in the uplink is larger than in the downlink, because only the former is affected by multiuser interference. For a given (small) ratio of maximum frequency offset to carrier spacing, enlarging the spreading factor in a fully loaded system does not affect the downlink degradation, but strongly increases the uplink degradation