Comparative Study of OFDM and CDMA Technique

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modulation is being used more and more in telecommunication both in wired and wireless. This modulation technique has several advantages, reason for its increasing usage in communication. OFDM can provide high data rates, it can be implemented easily, it is spectrally efficient and with sufficient robustness to channel imperfections. On the other hand most third generation mobile phone systems are using Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) as their modulation technique. For this reason, CDMA is also investigating so that the performance of both CDMA and OFDM can be compared. It is found that OFDM performs extremely well when compared with CDMA, and provide very high tolerance to multipath delay spread, channel noise, and peak power clipping. In addition to this it provides a high spectral efficiency The noise performance of OFDM is found to depend solely on the modulation technique used for modulating each carrier of the signal. The OFDM signal performance is found to be the same as for a single carrier system, using the same modulation technique and can provide large data rates with sufficient robustness to radio channel impairments The minimum signal to noise ratio (SNR) required for BPSK was ~7 dB, where as it was ~12 dB for QPSK and ~25 dB for 16PSK. CDMA was found to perform poorly in a single cellular system, with each cell only allowing 7-16 simultaneous users in a cell, compared with 128 for OFDM.1.25 MHz bandwidth and 19.5 kbps user data rate was used for it. This low cell capacity of CDMA was attributed to the use of non-orthogonal codes used in the reverse transmission link, leading to a high level of inter-user interference.