REVIEW REPORT

ON
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF SPACE-
TIME BLOCK CODED AND CYCLIC DELAY
DIVERSITY MC-CDMA SYSTEMS


SUBMITTED BY:
Nilesh Loya
Raj Dave BT10ECE018
Yash Desai BT10ECE019
Sourabh Deshpande BT10ECE020
AFZAL LODHI, FATIN SAID, MISCHA DOHLER, AND A. HAMID AGHVAMI- KINGS COLLEGE,
LONDON.
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS - APRIL 2005

INTRODUCTION
Multi-carrier code-division multiple access (MCCDMA) is a promising approach to the challenge
of providing high data rate wireless communication. It represents the fusion of two distinct
techniques:
I. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
II. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)
MC-CDMA combines the benefits of CDMA with the natural robustness to frequency selectivity
offered by OFDM. OFDM-based systems, in particular MC-CDMA are the most promising
candidate for fourth-generation broadband mobile communication networks. Such systems
deployed with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques will allow us to realize and
satisfy the ever growing demands of multimedia services and applications. OFDM has been
successfully used in standards for digital audio broadcasting (DAB), terrestrial video
broadcasting (DVB-T), and WLANs. It reduces the receiver complexity in the equalization and
symbol decoding stages by transmitting each symbol over a single flat sub-channel. OFDMs
inability to extract multipath diversity (inherently present in the broadband wireless channel)
and guarantee symbol detection when channel nulls occur on parallel sub-channels are the two
adverse effects associated with its simplicity. On the other hand, MC-CDMA mitigates the
degradation due to severe multipath with the help of OFDM, and in addition uses spread and
coded signals over parallel subcarriers, thereby taking full advantage of frequency diversity. It
also guarantees symbol detection with the help of spread data, which makes it the most flexible
multiple access scheme for future cellular networks.
CHANNEL AND SYSTEM MODELS
We consider a broadband frequency-selective Rayleigh fading MIMO channel with N MCCDMA
subcarriers, NTx transmit, and NRx receive antennas. Suppose that the frequency-selective
fading channel between each pair of transmit and receive antennas has D independent paths
and the same power delay profile. Taking the downlink case and assuming that all users
experience the same fading, the time domain channel impulse response from the ith transmit
to the rth receive antenna can be modelled as a tapped delay line. We assume that the MIMO
channel is spatially uncorrelated; that is, the channel taps are independent for different
antenna indices (i, r) and the channel responses for specific antenna pairs are correlated in
frequency due to the circular symmetric structure of the channel matrix and close subcarrier
spacing.

SIMULATION RESULTS
A simulation platform has been used to compare the bit error rate (BER) performance of CDD
and STBC MC-CDMA systems with and without frequency interleaving. All results are produced
for BER vs. SNR, defined as the transmitted bit power over the noise power spectral density
(Eb/N0). A total bandwidth of 101.5 MHz has been considered for 768 subcarriers with a
spreading factor of 16. Walsh-Hadamard spreading codes are used. A 1024-point IFFT/FFT is
employed for 768 subcarriers. From the total bandwidth, 250 kHz is dedicated for CP, which
leaves the subcarrier spacing of 131.836 kHz. Hence, the total MC-CDMA symbol duration
becomes 8.029 s (7.585 and 0.444 s for data and CP, respectively). A half-rate convolutional
encoder (R = 1/2, (133, 171)8) and soft Viterbi decoder are used for channel coding and
decoding. An 18-tap Rayleigh fading channel model with one receive antenna is used in all
simulations. The delay values for the CDD system are chosen according to Eq. 7. Perfect channel
estimation with MRC for single and MMSEC detection for fully loaded systems are used. Both
uncoded and coded results are presented to show that CDD can achieve significant diversity
levels with the help of spreading and, when used with channel coding, can extract spatial as
well as multipath diversity, which makes it quite desirable with its associated simplicity.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this paper they compared the performance and applicability of two transmits diversity
schemes applied to an MC-CDMA system. The diversity schemes of choice were CDD and STBCs,
owing to their comparably low implementational complexity. The following advantages and
disadvantages could be pinpointed, which allow the system designer to trade complexity
against performance. The CDD scheme is much simpler to implement and can be used for any
number of transmit antennas. It conforms with current standards because, independent of the
number of transmit antennas, the receiver remains unchanged. An additional advantage is that
it requires only one IFFT operation per symbol at the transmitter. This scheme is thus ideal for
MC-CDMA, because it gains from the systems spreading and achieves sufficient diversity even
for an uncoded system. For a coded system, it still provides significant spatial and multipath
diversity gain, which can be improved further by employing interleaving in the time and
frequency domains.
With the above observations they conclude that, in terms of complexity and standard
conformity vs. error rate performance, CDD performs optimally in conjunction with an MC-
CDMA system operating under realistic load and channel conditions.