Human opinion dynamics optimization for ICI mitigation in MC-CDMA systems

•Control parameters and convergence of HODO algorithm.•Designed the toolbox for HODO algorithm to perform simulations.•Introduced a HODO based Multiuser Detector (MUD) for ICI mitigation.•A mathematical model to interface humans with communication technology. This paper presents a novel social impact based approach named as Human Opinion Dynamics Optimization (HODO) to detect signals of Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) systems in the presence of Inter Subcarrier Interference (ICI). The ICI occurs because of various factors, such as Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), Sampling Frequency Offset (SFO) and channel mobility. The ICI degrades orthogonality between different subcarriers in MC-CDMA system due to which Multiple Access Interference (MAI) occurs. The HODO is based on the socio-psychological behavior of humans in the society. Opinion dynamics leads to human consensus and consensus builds up due to human interactions in a society. The proposed approach could be used to introduce human opinion based intelligent communication networks. Our method is novel in the sense that with this algorithm, social sciences could be made compatible with wireless communication technology, which will go a long way to bridge the gap between humans and the communication technology. This new method works with very few number of control parameters and reduces the bit error rate (BER) better as compared with other conventional stochastic methods like Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Numerical simulation results show that the proposed detector also reduces the computational complexity manifold.