Performance of multicarrier CDMA with successive interference cancellation in a multipath fading channel

A high capacity, low complexity, and robust system design for a successive interference cancellation (SIC) system is developed and analyzed. Multicarrier code-division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is used to suppress multipath and to overcome the multipath channel estimation problem in single-carrier SIC systems. In addition, an optimal power control algorithm for MC-CDMA with SIC is derived, allowing analytical bit-error rate expressions to be found for an uncoded system. Low-rate forward error-correcting codes are then added to the system to achieve robustness. It is found that the capacity of the coded system approaches the additive white Gaussian noise capacity for SIC, even in a fading multipath channel with channel estimation error. This indicates that MC-CDMA is very attractive for systems employing SIC.