The effect of carrier phase jitter on MC-CDMA performance

In this paper, we investigate the influence of the carrier phase jitter of a phase-locked local oscillator on the performance of a multi-carrier code-division multipleaccess (MC-CDMA) system in a non-dispersive channel. This carrier phase jitter degrades the signal-to-noise ratio at the input of the decision device. When all users have the same power level and phase jitter spectrum, it is shown that for the highest load, the degradation only depends on the jitter variance but not on the specific shape of the jitter spectrum nor on the number of carriers.