On the performance of MC-CDMA with interleaved concatenated coding and interference cancellation for high-rate data transmission

A coded wideband MC-CDMA system is considered for high-bit-rate data transmission in a typical outdoor environment with Rayleigh multipath fading. First, two powerful interleaved concatenated coding techniques, turbo and serially concatenated convolutional codes (SCCC) codes are applied in the downlink system and important conclusions are derived on their relative performance behavior in this type of system. Simulation results indicate some of the relative merits of SCCC on achieving very low error rates, with relative mitigation of error floor behavior at the typical BER range of interest for wireless data applications. Next, the more critical uplink system is considered, which requires a multiuser detection technique in combination with powerful coding to achieve similar performance. Successive interference cancellation with SCCC coding is presented, with computation of optimal log-likelihood ratios required for this type of interference cancellation followed by SCCC decoding. Application of SCCC coding and interference cancellation has improved the system performance significantly even in the fully loaded case. Based on these results, the combination of SCCC coding and successive cancellation is found to be attractive for high-rate data transmission in the uplink MC-CDMA.