Application of rate compatible punctured turbo coded hybrid ARQ to MC-CDMA mobile radio

MC-CDMA, a multicarrier (MC) modulation scheme based on code division multiple access (CDMA), is the most likely candidate for the next generation of mobile radio communications. The rate compatible punctured turbo (RCPT) coded hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) has been found to give improved throughput performance in a direct sequence (DS) CDMA system. However, the extent to which the RCPT HARQ improves the throughput performance of an MC-CDMA system has not been fully understood. In this paper, we apply the RCPT HARQ to MC-CDMA and evaluate by computer simulations its performance in a frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. We found that the performance of RCPT HARQ MC-CDMA is almost insensitive to channel characteristics. The performance can be drastically improved with receive diversity combined with space-time transmit diversity. In addition, the comparison of RCPT HARQ MC-CDMA, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, and DS-CDMA shows that under similar conditions the throughput of MC-CDMA is the best in a frequency selective fading channel.