Reference Symbol Assisted Multi-Stage Successive Interference Cancellation for CDMA Wireless Communication: Robustness toParameter Imperfectionswith Biphase and Quadriphase spreading

Abstract

This paper investigates the sensitivity to system imperfections of a reference symbol assisted multi-stage successive interference cancelling (RAMSIC) receiver. Reverse link of a CDMA system with binary antipodal modulation and coherent detection is considered. Performance of systems using either biphase and quadriphase spreading is compared under different operating conditions. Analysis of a conventional matched filter receiver operating on an AWGN channel reveals that when the number of users is small (such that the multiple access interference cannot be accurately modelled as Gaussian), quadriphase spreading has a significant advantage over biphase spreading. This advantage, however, disappears when the number of users per sector is large (of the order necessary for the multiple access interference to be considered Gaussian). Results for the RAMSIC receiver with quadriphase spreading, on the other hand, show that for hexagonal cell geometry with path loss exponent of 4 and without any forward error correction coding, the traffic capacity is between 1.17 and 1.67 times that of the IS-95. These numbers represent a significant increase over those obtained with biphase spreading. Further investigation with nonidealized cell geometries and other path loss exponents also shows substantial capacity improvement over that of conventional correlator receivers. Performance losses due to nonideal transmitter power amplifier gating, imperfect power control and synchronization errors in the RAKE receiver are also determined. The results for biphase spreading show that for path loss exponent of 4, imperfect amplifier gating causes relatively minor decrease in the traffic capacity, while no such effect is observed for path loss exponents of 2 and 3. As expected, relaxing of power control for both biphase and quadriphase spreading has a similar capacity reducing effect. In spite of these two effects the resultant capacity is still significantly higher than that with the conventional matched filter receiver. Capacity increase with quadriphase over biphase spreading is between 1.4 and 2.0 times. Chip synchronization errors of the order to be expected in a properly designed conventional CDMA system have only minimal effect on performance. Therefore, we conclude that conventional synchronization algorithms should perform adequately with successive interference cancelling receivers considered in the paper.