Performance of multicarrier CDMA with DPSK modulation and differential detection in fading multipath channels

Abstract

Multicarrier (MC) direct sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) with differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) modulation and differential detection is proposed. Transmitted data bits are differentially encoded after serial-to-parallel conversion to a number of parallel streams. On each branch, encoded bits are direct sequence spread spectrum (SS) modulated and transmitted using different carriers. The system is analyzed with a differential detector in static Rayleigh fading multipath channel, in fast Rayleigh fading multipath channel and for variable overlapping between carrier spectra in static fading channel. Closed-form expressions are derived for the error probability and evaluated for many cases. The performance is compared to that of a system using phase-shift keying (PSK) with conventional matched filter (CMF) coherent receiver. For static fading channel, the error probability performance of the differential detector is close to that of CMF receiver. For fast fading, the performance degrades slightly with increasing fading rate. Finally; successive carriers of the system are allowed to overlap with various overlapping percentages. The condition of a single path can be achieved by increasing both the number of carriers and the separation between successive carriers. Also, for each number of carriers, there exists an optimum overlapping percentage at which the system performance is optimized. The performance of the proposed DPSK with differential detection system is close to that of PSK with CMF receiver, but the former is simpler to implement.