Multiuser detection of DS-CDMA signals using partial parallel interference cancellation in satellite communications

Multiuser detection (MUD) using parallel interference cancellation (PIC) technique provides a good complexity, latency, and performance compromise. This technique is suitable for satellite systems using either code-division multiple-access (CDMA) or a combination of time-division multiple-access (TDMA) and CDMA. We offer a new scheme that is a combination of soft and hard PIC detectors whose performance is superior to that of the other famous suboptimal detectors. In soft partial parallel interference cancellation (PPIC), in the first few stages, when the performance is still poor, the accurate knowledge of power and phase cannot be of much use. However, in the following stages, accurate power and phase estimation can improve the performance. This coincides with the time when the decisions are reliable enough to be used for parameter estimation. In our scheme, after a few stages of soft interference cancellation (IC), estimation of the parameters will start. Having these estimates, in the subsequent stages hard IC is performed. The complexity of this scheme grows linearly with the number of users. Moreover, this scheme is much faster than other receivers such as successive interference cancellation (SIC). PIC detectors are usually studied in equal-power case, i.e., a perfect power control scheme is assumed. In this paper, PIC detector in a near-far condition where user signals arrive at the receiver with different power levels is also investigated.