Theoretical analysis and performance of the decorrelating detector for DS-CDMA signals in nonlinear channels

We analyze the effects of the nonlinear distortions, introduced by the transmitting high-power amplifier (HPA), on the performance of the linear decorrelating multiuser detector in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) downlink systems. By assuming and motivating the Gaussian distribution of the nonlinear distortion noise, the symbol-error rate (SER) and the total degradation (TD) has been derived theoretically in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency-flat Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results show that the analytical model is quite accurate in many scenarios.