Interference mitigation in uplink STBC MC-CDMA system based on PIC receiver

Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is attractive technique for high speed data transmission in multipath fading channel. MC-CDMA system cannot handle the sudden time variations of the channel which cause the subcarriers to lose their orthogonality. The loss of orthogonality between the subcarriers of a user or unwanted correlation between the spreading codes of different user can lead to increase in Multiple Access Interference (MAI). Space Time Block Code (STBC) based MC-CDMA system is chosen to achieve full diversity and transmission rate without the knowledge of Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter. Thus, in the paper STBC is introduced at the transmitter to improve the quality of the receiver. Space Time Block Code-Parallel Interference Cancellation (STBC-PIC) receiver has been proposed for MC-CDMA system. In the proposed STBC-PIC receiver, at each interference cancellation stage, weighted signal of the other user is subtracted from signal of the desired user, thereby reducing the MAI and improving the BER performance. From the simulation results, it is observed that the proposed receiver outperforms STBC-Orthogonal Complete Complementary Code (STBC-OCCC), STBC-Minimum Mean Square Error (STBC-MMSE) and STBC-Zero Forcing (STBC-ZF) receivers for MAI reduction. © 2017, Allerton Press, Inc.