Spectral efficiency of a single-cell multi-carrier DS-CDMA system in Rayleigh fading

The spectral efficiency of a multi-carrier direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (MC/DS-CDMA) system operating in a Rayleigh fading environment is investigated and evaluated in terms of the theoretically achievable channel capacity (in the Shannon sense) per user, estimated in an average sense. This short paper covers operation of the considered system over broadcast communication randomly time-varying channels as applicable to wireless radio networks and single-cell indoor mobile systems and leads to the derivation of a closed-form expression for the achieved spectral efficiency. Furthermore, the relation between the number of the employed sub-carriers and the achieved spectral efficiency is revealed.