Pilot-assisted adaptive channel estimation for coded MC-CDMA with ICI cancellation

One of the promising wireless access techniques for the next generation mobile communications systems is multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA). MC-CDMA can provide good transmission performance owing to the frequency diversity effect in a severe frequency-selective fading channel. However, the bit error rate (BER) performance of coded MC-CDMA is inferior to that of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) due to the residual inter-code interference (ICI) after frequency-domain equalization (FDE). Recently, we proposed a frequency-domain soft interference cancellation (FDSIC) to reduce the residual ICI and confirmed by computer simulation that the MC-CDMA with FDSIC provides better BER performance than OFDM. However, ideal channel estimation was assumed. In this paper, we propose adaptive decision-feedback channel estimation (ADFCE) and evaluate by computer simulation the average BER and throughput performances of turbo-coded MC-CDMA with FDSIC. We show that even if a practical channel estimation is used, MC-CDMA with FDSIC can still provide better performance than OFDM.