Spread Spectrum-Based Subcarrier Recovery Method for Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiplexing System

A time domain Spread Spectrum (SS)-based subcarrier recovery method is proposed for down-link Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiplexing (MC-CDM) system, which periodically inserts SS pilot signals into data signal stream in a time division manner at the transmitter. Instantaneous channel impulse response is first estimated by correlating the received pilot signal at the receiver, and then corresponding instantaneous frequency response essential for subcarrier recovery is calculated from the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of the estimated impulse response. The SS pilot-assisted method is also applicable to Direct Sequence (DS)-CDM system as a means to estimate instantaneous channel impulse response for Rake combining, and taking the same approach in both MC-CDM and DS-CDM systems, there is no large difference between them in terms of transmission efficiency and receiver complexity. The proposed MC-CDM system must be a promising down-link multiplexing protocol, because it can achieve better bit error rate (BER) performance than the DS-CDM system with the same SS pilot-assisted Rake combiner in frequency selective fast Rayleigh fading channel.