Performance analysis of fixed and mobile WiMAX MC-CDMA-based system

This paper presents a new method of using multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) as a transmission scheme, instead of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in the WiMAX based on the IEEE 802.16 standards. A comparative study of the performance of the two schemes are presented by writing a MATLAB code to simulate both the fixed WiMAX (IEEE 802.16d) and the mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e). The performance of the mobile WiMAX is evaluated for several velocities. Different modulation and forward error correction (FEC) coding methods are used in this simulation. The spreading code used in the MC-CDMA system is Walsh-Hadamard code. In this study we used the bit error rate (BER) versus the ratio of bit energy to noise power spectral density (E_b/N_o) as the performance measure. It is shown that the WIMAX based on MC-CDMA outperforms the one based on the conventional OFDM.