Effect of antenna diversity on performance of reference symbol assisted interference cancellation in CDMA wireless systems

This paper investigates the effect of antenna diversity on the performance of a reference symbol assisted multi-stage interference cancelling (RAMSIC) receiver. The uplink of a DS-CDMA system with coherent detection operating on a flat Rayleigh fading system is considered. The results show that with a realistic feedback power control algorithm, in fast fading the capacity of the system with dual receive antenna diversity can be increased 1.6 times over that of the IS-95 system. It is also demonstrated that the capacity of the system in a slow fading environment increases dramatically over that under fast fading. Therefore, the 1.6 fold advantage of the RAMSIC receiver may be interpreted as the worst case performance advantage. Investigation of transmitter antenna diversity shows that in systems requiring lower BER (10^-4 or less), such as in image and video communication, artificial multipath created by two transmitting antennas increases capacity