On the Performance of MC-CDMA Systems with Partial Equalization in the Presence of Channel Estimation Errors

The paper investigates the performance of a multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system adopting a partial equalization (PE) technique at the receiver. It has been recently shown that, in spite of the fact that the PE technique has the same complexity of the well known maximal ratio combining, orthogonality restoring combining and equal gain combining techniques, the PE significantly improves the performance in terms of bit error probability (BEP). Previous works considered PE with ideal channel state information (CSI) and evaluate the PE parameter which minimizes the BEP; here we relax this assumption considering the presence of CSI errors. In particular, we analytically derive the mean BEP for the downlink of a MC-CDMA system and the optimal PE parameter, when imperfect CSI is assumed. Numerical results show that the optimum choice of the PE with ideal CSI provides significant performance improvement also in the presence of CSI errors.