Performance Analysis of Orthogonal Frequency and Code Hopping Multiplexing

Beyond-3G wireless communication systems should support packet traffic with both low/medium rate and high rate services. Scheduling-based resource allocation schemes may cause a problem in accommodating low/medium rate services due to a rate mismatch and a large signaling overhead. Dedicated resource allocation/multiplexing schemes are also inadequate for accommodating packet-type traffic that is characterized by low channel activity and high burstiness. Therefore, we propose a new orthogonal frequency and code hopping multiplexing (OFCHM) scheme for downlink multiplexing to provide efficient support of packet traffic with low/medium data rates in a spread OFDM environment. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of the statistical multiplexing gain, the block error rate, and the overall capacity by using both an analytical approach and simulation. The proposed scheme yields a larger overall downlink capacity than a dedicated resource allocation/multiplexing scheme. A comparison study with the variable spreading factor-orthogonal frequency and code division multiplexing (VSF-OFCDM) system through system-level simulations is also performed. The comparison results show that the OFCHM system yields better performance than the VSF-OFCDM system in packet delay, packet delay variance, and fairness, and has a system throughput advantage with low/medium rate services.