The capacity of a spread spectrum CDMA system for cellular mobile radio with consideration of system imperfections

Abstract

There has been much interest in the use of spread spectrum code division multiple access (CDMA) techniques for cellular mobile radio. To date, spread spectrum has been used mainly for military applications, in which the inherent transmission security and immunity to deliberate jamming are important. Spread spectrum systems, however, possess various other features such as multiple access and multipath rejection capability, which make their use attractive within the mobile radio environment. However, the current interest has been principally motivated by the work of Gilhousen et al. (see IEEE Trans. Vehic. Technol., vol.VT-40, no.2, p.303, 1991) in which it is claimed that the CDMA option may offer capacity improvement over more conventional frequency and time division multiple access, FDMA and TDMA, techniques. Within this paper, the relative capacities of a basic FDMA and CDMA system are examined. It is shown that, in the absence of capacity-enhancing features such as voice activity detection and cell sectorization, the capacity of each system is comparable. The paper then assesses the sensitivity of the CDMA system to typical propagation conditions, power control errors, and realistic antenna patterns and shows that the capacity of a CDMA system may be significantly reduced under nonideal conditions. >