Iterative interference cancellation for DS-CDMA systems with high system loads using reliability-dependent feedback

In this paper, coded transmission over time-variant multipath Rayleigh-fading channels employing direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) is considered. Assuming ideal knowledge of the actual channel state and randomly chosen spreading sequences, we show that iterative multi-user interference suppression based on adapted minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) filters combined with serial successive cancellation and single user decoding can reach near optimum performance within a few iteration cycles. This holds even for doubly loaded systems, i.e., when the number of users K in the system is two times as large as the spreading factor N. Further, we evidence that for sufficiently reliable symbol estimates soft decision feedback can be replaced by hard decision feedback without any performance degradation but with significant savings in complexity