A novel soft handoff technique using STTD for MC-CDMA in a frequency selective fading channel

Antennas are commonly located in close proximity to each other and there is high correlation between them. In such cases, there exists correlated fading among antennas. The correlated fading degrades the performance of this system. This paper presents an effective soft handoff technique using space time transmitter diversity (STTD) with two base stations for multi-carrier (MC)-CDMA to achieve high diversity gain in a wireless broadband channel. The proposed system is a dual step diversity scheme in frequency selective fading channel environments combining the frequency diversity effect achieved by the use of multi-carriers and the antenna diversity gain afforded by STTD. This is an effective diversity scheme, which improves the signal quality at the receiver by simple processing across two transmit antennas. No feedback from the receiver to the transmitter is required in this system and the computation complexity is low. Copyright (C) 2004 AEI.