Effect of carrier phase noise and frequency offset on the performance of multicarrier CDMA systems

Abstract

Kaiser (1995) showed that OFDM-CDMA outperforms DS-CDMA in radio fading channels in terms of spectral efficiency, under the assumption of ideal carrier recovery and chip synchronization. However, residual carrier frequency offset and phase noise degrade the system performance significantly if suitable countermeasures are not taken. In this work we consider the downlink of a cellular multicarrier CDMA system. In particular, we evaluate the impact of the carrier frequency offset and Wiener phase noise on the system performance considering typical indoor radio channels. Moreover, a frequency detector is used to reduce the impairment produced by the carrier frequency offset. Results are given in terms of BER obtained by means of simulations and analytical computations.