Transmit/receive antenna diversity for frequency-interleaved single-carrier spread spectrum multi-access with frequency-domain equalization

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the downlink bit error rate (BER) performance of DS-CDMA in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, the uplink BER performance degrades due to a strong multi-user interference (MUI). We have proposed frequency-interleaved single-carrier spread spectrum multi-access (SC-SSMA) with MMSE-FDE, in which the subcarrier components of each user's signal are interleaved onto a wider bandwidth. Since frequency-interleaving patterns assigned to different users are orthogonal to each other, frequency-interleaved SC-SSMA can avoid the MUI completely while achieving frequency diversity gain with MMSE-FDE. In this paper, transmit/receive antenna diversity is applied to frequency-interleaved SC-SSMA with MMSE-FDE to further improve the BER performance. Its conditional BER is derived for the given set of channel gains. The average BER performance is numerically evaluated using the derived conditional BER and is confirmed by computer simulation.