Multi-carrier code-division multiple access

Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a multiple access scheme used in OFDM-based telecommunication systems, allowing the system to support multiple users at the same time.

MC-CDMA is essentially DS-CDMA on the frequency domain. At the transmitter, each user generates N data symbols in each OFDM symbol duration, which are spread into NM symbols using a length-M spreading code, then the symbols from different users are added together and the resulting NM symbols are fed to the IFFT module of OFDM. At the receiver, the data symbols of each user can be recovered by despreading the FFT output.

References

• Hughes Software Systems, Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access, March 2002.

See Also

• OFDMA, an alternative multiple access scheme for OFDM systems, where the signals of different users are separated in the frequency domain by allocating different sub-carriers to different users.