An efficient heuristic method for multiuser detection in DS-CDMA systems

Optimum multiuser detection (OMD) in direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) communication systems is a combinatorial optimization problem and has been proven NP-complete. Many heuristics have been presented to solve this problem, but few of them consider the fitness landscape of OMD carefully. In this paper, we analyze the fitness landscape of OMD, including the neighborhood structure and the distribution of local optima. Numerical results give hints on how to design efficient heuristic algorithms for the problem. A meta-heuristic algorithm considering the analysis results is proposed With a proper local search and a well-chosen perturbation strategy, the proposed algorithm can find the (near) optimal solution rapidly with lower computational complexity. Simulation results show it outperforms other heuristic multiuser detection algorithms when the number of users is large. In the condition of small number of users, it can achieve the bit error rate (BER) bound of OMD.