BER Degradation of MC-CDMA at High SNR with MMSE Equalization and Residual Frequency Offset

Multicarrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is an attractive technique for high speed wireless data transmission in view of its advantages over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. In this paper, we analyze the performance of fully loaded downlink MC-CDMA systems with minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer in the presence of residual frequency offset (RFO) in multipath Rayleigh fading channels. We first show that as the SNR is increased beyond a value, referred as threshold SNR, the performance degrades. We then analyze the cause for this behavior and propose a remedy to prevent the degradation by regularizing the coefficient(s) of the equalizer, and use the regularized equalizer for SNRs beyond the threshold value. We suggest two methods for estimating this SNR, one gives close to the true value but requires the knowledge of RFO and the channel state information (CSI), while the other gives an approximate value but requires only CSI. We show that the regularization based on the approximate value also prevents the degradation, but the performance at higher SNRs is slightly poorer compared to that with the better estimate. Numerical and simulation results are provided to support the analysis.