On the effect of High Power Amplifier Nonlinearity on MIMO MC-CDMA systems

The combination of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) with Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiplexing Access (MC-CDMA) is a promising technique for achieving high performance with very high data rates in 4G broadband wireless communications. Nevertheless, Nonlinearity of High-Power Amplifier (HPA) plays a crucial role in the performance of MIMO MC-CDMA systems. In this paper, we investigate the performance of VBLAST MIMO MC-CDMA system in the presence of nonlinear HPA. In order to illustrate this fact, different receivers, such as ZF, IC-ZF, MMSE IC-MMSE and QR-ML, are considered and mutually compared. Specifically, we assess the impact of HPA nonlinearity on the Bit Error Rate (BER), when the system is operated under Rayleigh fading channel. Numerical results are provided and show the effects of several system parameters, such as type of receivers, number of transmit and receive antennas, number of users and spreading factor length, on system performance.