—Transmitter-based signal pre-processing is investigated for the two-dimensional (2-D) OFDM-CDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, code division multiple access) forward link systems, aiming to increase the system sum-capacity and shift the signal processing complexity of a mobile unit to the base station. For the non-selective fading channels, the optimum pre-processing that achieves the maximum ergodic sum-capacity is obtained by applying the principle of multi-user water filling under the condition of zero multiple access interference (MAI). For the selective fading channels, on the other hand, three sub-optimum methods including ZF (zero-forcing) with power normalization, MMSE (minimum mean square error), and the newly proposed ZF with multi-user water filling are investigated under the constraint of total transmit power. Numerical results show that: (i) The new pre-processing outperforms the traditional other two in terms of achievable sum-capacity. (ii) 2-D spreading...