MC-CDMA Performance in the Presence of Timing Errors

In this contribution, we investigate the influence of timing errors on the performance of a multicarrier codedivision multiple-access (MC-CDMA) system. We show that a constant timing offset introduces no degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the input of the decision device as it can be compensated without loss of performance. On the other hand, in the presence of timevarying timing errors performance degrades. We show that the MC-CDMA system is very sensitive to a clock frequency offset: the system performance rapidly degrades for an increasing number of carriers. It is also shown that the timing jitter gives rise to a performance degradation that is essentially independent of the number of carriers. Moreover, this degradation caused by the timing jitter does not depend on the spectral contents of the jitter.