BER Performance for MC-CDMA Systems in the Presence of HPA Non-Linearity

Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a promising multicarrier multiple access technology for present and future cellular communications. It has some advantages over the traditional multiple access technology like TDMA, FDMA and DSCDMA, etc. MC-CDMA was first proposed in 1993. Since its commencement, it has garnered international attention with hundreds of research articles written about its promise. In this paper, an AWGN channel is considered to evaluate the performance of MC-CDMA employing Walsh-Hadamard codes, considered to evaluate the performance of MC-CDMA, employing amplifier HPA in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) for downlink. We investigate the impact of HPA non-linearities (caused by a Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier (TWTA)) on the MC-CDMA systems for different PSK/QAM modulation scheme.