Performance evaluation of cyclic prefix CDMA systems with frequency domain interference cancellation

Direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) systems transmitting over multipath channels suffer from intersymbol interference (ISI) and multiple access interference (MAI). Recently, DS/CDMA with frequency domain equalization (FDE) has attracted much attention for its ability to obtain an excellent performance even in strong frequency selective fading channels. However, the presence of residual interference after the FDE degrades the orthogonality among the spreading codes and hence the BER performance deteriorates. Parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is an effective method to suppress the MAI and improve the CDMA system capacity. In this paper, we propose three interference cancellation architectures for downlink cyclic prefix CDMA systems. The common thread between these three architectures is their implementation in frequency domain. A comparison between such architectures is presented. Simulation results show that the combination of PIC and FDE provides an efficient solution to suppress the MAI in downlink CDMA systems over frequency selective fading channels.