DS-CDMA vs. MC-CDMA, a performance survey in inter-vendor spectrum sharing environment

In this paper, the performance of hybrid FDMA/DS-CDMA and MC-CDMA systems are studied in a cellular system with a simple intra-cell inter-vendor spectrum sharing algorithm. Their performance is then compared both with each other and a system without sharing. The comparison is based on the following performance measures: a) total bandwidth efficiency, b) average call blocking rate, c) average spreading code change rate, d) total revenue and e) implementation complexity. Both systems improve the spectrum utilization compared to the system without sharing. MC-CDMA is seen to have better performance than DS-CDMA with higher complexity and implementation cost.