Performance analysis of MC-CDMA communication systems over Nakagami-m environments

Abstract

The performance for a MC-CDMA (multi-carrier coded-division multiple-access) system working in uncorrelated and correlated fading channels with Nakagami distribution is investigated in this paper. We adopt the BPSK modulation scheme with an alternative expression for Q-function to evaluate the BER (bit error rate) performance of the MC-CDMA system. The sum of Gamma variates is adopted for deriving a closed-form solution for arbitrarily correlated channel in order to avoid the difficulty of explicitly obtaining the pdf (probability density function) for the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) at the MRC (maximum ratio combining) output. The results with simple expression obviously show that the BER performance of the MC-CDMA system is sensitive to the correlation of fading channels.