In this letter, we propose the channel estimation technique in the uplink of a DS/CDMA system with M-ary orthogonal signaling over multipath fading channels. The channel estimation is carried out using the maximum correlator output of RAKE receiver. With the estimated channel parameters, the RAKE receiver can coherently combines the received multipath signals, resulting in a significant performace improvement. The hardware complexity of the proposed detection technique is slightly increased when compared to that of noncoherent detection.

One of the main disadvantage of multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) signals is the high peak power of the transmitted signals which limits their applications. To account for this issue, we provide a simple signal processing for reducing the high crest factor (CF) of MC-CDMA signals. Using this modified MC-CDMA signal, the high CF due to Walsh spreading sequences can be mitigated without explicit side information and degradation in the detection performance.