Iterative multiuser receivers for coded DS-CDMA systems

Abstract

The introduction of cellular wireless systems in the 1980s has resulted in a continuous and growing demand for personal communication services. This demand has made larger capacity systems necessary. With the interest from both the research community and industry in wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems, the application of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques to wireless systems is becoming increasingly important. MUD is an important area of interest to help obtain the significant increase in capacity needed for future wireless services. The standardisation of direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) systems in the third generation of mobile communication systems has raised even more interest in exploiting the capabilities and capacity of this type of technology. However, the conventional DS-CDMA system has the major problem of multiple-access interference (MAI). The MAI is unavoidable because receivers deal with information which is transmitted not by a single source but by several uncoordinated and geographically separated sources. As a result, the capacity of these systems is inherently interference limited by other users. To overcome these limitations, MUD emerges as a promising approach to increase the system capacity. This thesis addresses the problem of improving the downlink capacity of a coded DS-CDMA system with the use of MUD techniques at the mobile terminal receiver. The optimum multiuser receiver scheme is far too computational intensive for practical use. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to investigate sub-optimal multiuser receiver schemes that can exploit the advantages of MUD but also simplify its implementation. The attention is primarily focused on iterative MUD receiver schemes which apply the turbo multiuser detection principle. Essentially this principle consists of an iterative exchange of extrinsic information among the receiver modules to achieve improved performance. In this thesis, the implementation of an iterative receiver based on a linear MUD technique and a cancellation scheme over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is first proposed and analysed. The interference analysis shows that good performance is achieved using a lowcomplexity receiver structure. In more realistic mobile channels, however, this type of receiver suffers from the presence of higher levels of interference resulting in poor receiver performance. The reason for this is that in such scenarios the desired signals are no longer linearly separable. Therefore, non-linear detection techniques are required to provide better performance. With this purpose, a hybrid iterative multiuser receiver is investigated for the case of a stationary multipath channel. The incorporation of antenna arrays is an effective and practical technique to provide a significant capacity gain over conventional single-antenna systems. In this context, a novel space-time iterative multiuser receiver is proposed which achieves a large improvement in spectral efficiency and performance over multipath fading channels. In addition, it is shown that this architecture can be implemented without a prohibitive complexity cost. The exploitation of the iterative principle can be used to approach the capacity bounds of a coded DS-CDMA system. Using the Shannon’s sphere packing bound, a comparison is presented to illustrate how closely a practical system can approach the theoretical limits of system performance.