Performance of a reference symbol assisted multistage successive interference cancelling receiver in a multi-cell CDMA wireless system

The performance of a coherent multistage successive interference cancelling receiver using reference symbol assisted channel estimation is investigated for the reverse link of a multi-cell CDMA system. The transmitted signal structure is designed to improve the accuracy of channel estimates in the presence of multi-user interference. The multi-cell results show that for hexagonal cell geometry with path loss exponent of 4 and without any forward error correction coding, the capacity of the system is between 1.5 and 2.5 times that of a comparable commercial system. Traffic capacities with other path loss laws and cell geometries have also been determined and they show substantial improvement. The results also demonstrate that insignificant gain can be expected when the number of interference cancellation stages is increased beyond two