On the Error Performance of Sectorized Cellular Systems for MC-CDMA and OFDMA

We address downlink systems based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The systems are situated in a sectorized cellular structure whereas the cellular environment model takes into account path loss and shadowing depending on the position of the mobile terminal. We investigate and compare the error performances in such environments of the OFDM based multiple access scheme (OFDMA) and the multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) scheme. The performance of an OFDMA system can be enhanced for a lower-loaded system by introducing a radio resource management (RRM). In this paper, we show that in the peripheral area of the desired sector OFDMA with an RRM can support the mobile terminal with a better error performance than MC-CDMA. In contrast, pure OFDMA cannot surpass the MC-CDMA error performance. For the inner part of the sector, MC-CDMA outperforms OFDMA for lower resource loads by utilizing its whole diversity of used sub-carriers