Increasing CDMA capacity using multiple orthogonal spreading sequence sets and successive interference cancellation

In this paper, we present a code-division multiple access (CDMA) system with a spreading factor of N that can accommodate up to mN users, where m≥2. The m sets of orthogonal spreading sequences are constructed by overlaying the same N orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard sequences with a set-specific pseudo-noise (PN) sequence. Interference between user signals from different sets is cancelled by means of soft-decision iterative interference cancellation. We show that this technique, which is referred to as m-OCDMA, can accommodate more users and is computationally less complex than conventional PN-CDMA with the same type of interference cancellation. Assuming BPSK transmission over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and perfect power control, a degradation of 0.4 dB at the BER of 10^-5 in m-OCDMA is obtained with 2.56N users in the uplink or 3.03N users in the downlink. In PN-CDMA, this figure is 2.16N for both the uplink and the downlink.