Performance comparison of minimum variance single carrier and multicarrier cdma receivers

This work provides comparisons between CDMA-based multiple access systems in a single and multicarrier fashion. Both zero padding and cyclic prefix types of guard intervals are considered. Comparisons include different performance measures such as signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), bit error rate (BER), and robustness against channel order overestimation. We also address the effects of finite number of samples when estimating the detector filter. In order to allow a fair comparison, blind detection based on the minimum variance is assumed for all considered systems. It is shown through computer simulations that multicarrier CDMA performs better than single carrier CDMA and is more robust against channel order overestimation.