Determination of the cyclic prefix length in MC-CDMA using firefly algorithm

Cyclic prefix is utilized to prevent inter symbol interference and inter carrier interference in multi carrier communication systems such as multi-carrier code division multiple access that provides high speed data transmission. therefore determination of the cyclic prefix length properly, not only increases the error performance but also prevents the reduction in symbol energy. in this work, the fire fly algorithm which is a new meta-heuristic algorithm, is proposed to determine the cp length. by using the proposed algorithm, the better bit error rate in comparison with genetic algorithms and 1/8 rate cyclic prefix systems was obtained. due to the less parameters and high performance of this algorithm over genetic algorithms, it can be used in multi carrier code division multiplexing systems to determine the cyclic prefix length adaptively.