Augmenting the capacity of CDMA systems

Improvement of the capacity of the CDMA (code division multiple access) system is a major objective. The capacity of the system is mainly limited by the signal to noise ratio, where the noise comes from the channel background and from MAI (multiple access interference). Usually, the way to improve the capacity is to decrease the MAI; this is why orthogonal codes are adopted by the IS-95 standard. One problem is that the number of orthogonal codes is constrained by the dimensionality of the signal space. So in IS-95, there are only 64 orthogonal codes available when the number chips for each sequence is 64. To solve this problem, a non-orthogonal code called WBE (Welch bound equality) sequences (Massey and Mittelholzer 1991) is used in this paper The criterion to construct the code is to minimize the MAI. Two methods are used to construct the WBE sequences: from a linear cyclic code or from a Hadamard matrix. In order to improve the performance of the WBE sequence set, an iteration receiver (Sari et al. 1999) is applied. The conclusion obtained is that when the number of users is slightly greater than the signal space dimensionality, after the first iteration, the performance is only marginally worse than the orthogonal CDMA system.