A Cautionary View of the use of Cyclic Prefix on CDMA Systems

We call attention to the fact that, under certain conditions, the signal-to-noise ratio loss for a given E_b/N₀ value and the spectral efficiency degradation caused by cyclic prefix (CP) insertion may outweigh its benefits that is intersymbol interference elimination and better equalization when compared to an equivalent CDMA system without CP and with similar complexity frequency domain equalizer. In this paper, we analyze how such conditions (channel length and its frequency selectivity, E_b/N₀, number of active codes and equalizer length) affect the performance of both approaches in chip level equalization context