Multi-carrier code division multiple access

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Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a multiple access scheme used in OFDM-based telecommunication systems, allowing the system to support multiple users at the same time. MC-CDMA spreads each user symbol in the frequency domain. That is, each user symbol is carried over multiple parallel subcarriers, but it is phase shifted (typically 0 or 180 degrees) according to a code value. The code values differ per subcarrier and per user. The receiver combines all subcarrier signals, by weighing these to compensate varying signal strengths and undo the code shift. The receiver can separate signals of different users, because these have different (e.g. orthogonal) code values. Since each data symbol occupies a much wider bandwidth (in hertz) than the data rate (in bit/s), a signal-tonoise-plus-interference ratio (if defined as signal power divided by total noise plus interference power in the entire transmission band) of less than 0 dB is feasible. One way of interpreting MC-CDMA is to regard it as a direct-sequence CDMA signal (DS-CDMA) which is transmitted after it has been fed through an inverse FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)
Contents
[hide]

1 Rationale 2 Downlink: MC-CDM 3 Variants 4 References 5 Literature 6 See also

[edit]Rationale
Wireless radio links suffer from frequency-selective channel. If the signal on one subcarrier experiences an outage, it can still be reconstructed from the energy received over other subcarrier.

[edit]Downlink:

MC-CDM

In the downlink (one base station transmitting to one or more terminals), MC-CDMA typically reduces to MultiCarrier Code Division Multiplexing. All user signals can easily be synchronized, and all signals on one subcarrier experience the same radio channel properties. In such case a preferred system implementation is to take N user bits (possibly but not necessarily for different destinations), to transform these using a Walsh Hadamard Transform, followed by an I-FF.

[edit]Variants
A number of alternative possibilities exist as to how this frequency domain spreading can take place, such as by using a long PN code and multiplying each data symbol, di, on a subcarrier by a chip from the PN code, ci, or by using short PN codes and spreading each data symbol by an individual PN code i.e. di is multiplied by each ci and the resulting vector is placed on Nfreq subcarriers, where Nfreq is the PN code length. Once frequency domain spreading has taken place and the OFDM subcarriers have all been allocated values, OFDM modulation then takes place using the IFFT to produce anOFDM symbol; the OFDM guard interval is then added; and if transmission is in the downlink direction each of these resulting symbols are added together prior to transmission. An alternative form of multi-carrier CDMA, called MC-DS-CDMA or MC/DS-CDMA, performs spreading in the time domain, rather than in the frequency domain in the case of MC-CDMA for the special case where there is only one carrier, this reverts to standard DS-CDMA. For the case of MC-DS-CDMA where OFDM is used as the modulation scheme, the data symbols on the individual subcarriers are spread in time by multiplying the chips on a PN code by the data symbol on the subcarrier. For example, assume the PN code chips consist of {1, -1} and the data symbol on the subcarrier is j. The symbol being modulated onto that carrier, for symbols 0 and 1, will be -j for symbol 0 and +j for symbol 1. 2-dimensional spreading in both the frequency and time domains is also possible, and a scheme that uses 2-D spreading is VSF-OFCDM (which stands for variable spreading factor orthogonal frequency code-division multiplexing), which NTT DoCoMo is using for its 4G prototype system. As an example of how the 2D spreading on VSF-OFCDM works, if you take the first data symbol, d0, and a spreading factor in the time domain, SFtime, of length 4, and a spreading factor in the frequency domain, SFfrequency of 2, then the data symbol, d0, will be multiplied by the length-2 frequency-domain PN codes and placed on subcarriers 0 and 1, and these values on subcarriers 0 and 1 will then be multiplied by the length-4 time-domain PN code and transmitted on OFDM symbols 0, 1, 2 and 3.[1] NTT DoCoMo has already achieved 5 Gbit/s transmissions to receivers travelling at 10 km/h using its 4G prototype system in a 100 MHz-wide channel. This 4G prototype system also uses a 12x12 antenna MIMO configuration, and turbo coding for error correction coding.[2] Summary 1. OFDMA with frequency spreading (MC-CDMA) 2. OFDMA with time spreading (MC-DS-CDMA and MT-CDMA) 3. OFDMA with both time and frequency spreading (Orthogonal Frequency Code Division Multiple Access(OFCDMA))

[edit]References

1. ^ http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/atarashi02broadband.html Broadband Packet Wireless Access Based On VSFOFCDM And MC/DS-CDMA (2002) Atarashi et al. 2. ^ "DoCoMo Achieves 5 Gbit/s Data Speed". NTT DoCoMo Press. 2007-02-09.

[edit]Literature

N. Yee, J.P.M.G. Linnartz and G. Fettweis, "Multi-Carrier CDMA in indoor wireless Radio Networks", IEEE Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) Int. Conference, Sept. 1993, Yokohama, Japan, pp. 109113 (1993: first paper proposing the system and the name MC-CDMA)

K. Fazel and L. Papke, "On the performance of convolutionally-coded CDMA/OFDM for mobile communication system", IEEE Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) Int. Conference, Sept. 1993, Yokohama, Japan, pp. 468472

A. Chouly, A. Brajal, and S. Jourdan, "Orthogonal multicarrier techniques applied to direct sequence spread spectrum CDMA systems," in Proceedings of Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM'93), pp. 17231728, Houston, Tex, USA, November 1993.

N.Yee, J.P.M.G. Linnartz and G. Fettweis, "Multi-Carrier-CDMA in indoor wireless networks", IEICE Transaction on Communications, Japan, Vol. E77-B, No. 7, July 1994, pp. 900904.

J.P.M.G. Linnartz, "Performance Analysis of Synchronous MC-CDMA in mobile Rayleigh channels with both Delay and Doppler spreads", IEEE VT, Vol. 50, No. 6, Nov. 2001, pp 13751387. PDF

K. Fazel and S. Kaiser, Multi-Carrier and Spread Spectrum Systems: From OFDM and MC-CDMA to LTE and WiMAX, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-99821-2.

Hughes Software Systems, Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access, March 2002. German Aerospace Center, Institute of Communications and Navigation, History of Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) and Multi-Carrier Spread Spectrum Workshop, November 2006.

Wireless Communication Reference Web Site, section about MC-CDMA, 2001.

Multi-Carrier CDMA
Multi Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a relatively new concept. Its development aimed at improved performance over multipath links. MCCDMA is a modulation method that usesmulti-carrier transmission (more precisely OFDM) of DS-CDMA-type signals. This scheme was first proposed at PIMRC '93 in Yokohama by Linnartz, Yee (U. of California at Berkeley) and Fettweis (Teknekron, Berkeley, currently at U. of Dresden, Germany). Independently, Fazal and Papke proposed a similar system. Linnartz and Yee showed that MC-CDMA signals can also be detected with fairly simple receiver structures, using an FFT and a variable gain diversity combiner, in which the gain of each branch is controlled only by the channel attenuation at that subcarrier. At PIMRC '94 in The Hague, optimum gain control functions were presented. Results showed that a fully loaded MC-CDMA system, i.e., one in which the number of users equals the spread factor, can operate in a highly time dispersive channel with satisfactory bit error rate. These results appeared in contrast to the behaviour of a fully loaded DS-CDMA link that typically does not work satisfactorily with large time dispersion. Since 1993, MC-CDMA rapidly has become a topic of research. At the keynote address of the ISSSTA conference 1996, Prof. Hamid Aghvami predicted that the hottest topic in spread-spectrum, viz. multi-carrier cdma, would attract 80% of the research by 1997. Around 2000, we see that MC-CDMA has attracted tremendous attention, with entire conference sessions devoted to this. Mc-CDMA is praised as a modulation solution that merges the insights due to Shannon (particularly those relating to CDMA) with insights due to Fourier (particularly those explaining why OFDM has advantages in a dispersive channel).

What is orthogonal MC-CDMA?

There are many equivalent ways to describe MC-CDMA: 1. MC-CDMA is a form of CDMA or spread spectrum, but we apply the spreading in the frequency domain (rather than in the time domain as in Direct Sequence CDMA). 2. MC-CDMA is a form of Direct Sequence CDMA, but after spreading, a Fourier Transform (FFT) is performed.

3. MC-CDMA is a form of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), but we first apply an orthogonal matrix operation to the user bits. Therefor, MC-CDMA is sometimes also called "CDMA-OFDM". 4. MC-CDMA is a form of Direct Sequence CDMA, but our code sequence is the Fourier Transform of a Walsh Hadamard sequence. 5. MC-CDMA is a form of frequency diversity. Each bit is transmitted simultaneously (in parallel) on many different subcarriers. Each subcarrier has a (constant) phase offset. The set of frequency offsets form a code to distinguish different users. The MC-CDMA method described here is NOT the same as DS-CDMA using multiple carriers. In the latter system the spread factor per subcarrier can be smaller than with conventional DS-CDMA. Such a scheme is sometimes called MC-DSCDMA. This does not use the special OFDM-like waveforms to ensure dense spacing of overlapping, yet orthogonal subcarriers. MC-DS-CDMA has advantages over DSCDMA as it is easier to synchronize to this type of signals.

Possible Transmitter Implementation

Figure: possible implementation of an MultiCarrier spreadspectrum transmitter.

Each bit is transmitted over N different subcarriers. Each subcarrier has its own phase offset, determined by the spreading code. MC-Code Division Multiple Access systems allow simultaneous transmission of several such user signals on the same set of subcarriers. In the downlink multiplexer, this can be implemented using an Inverse FFT and a Code Matrix.

Figure: FFT implementation of an MC-CDMA base station multiplexer and transmitter.

MC-CDMA as a special case of DS-CDMA

Figure: possible implementation of a Multi-Carrier spread-spectrum transmitter. Each bit is transmitted over N different subcarriers. Each subcarrier has its own phase offset, determined by the spreading code.

The above transmitter can also be implemented as a Direct-Sequence CDMA transmitter, i.e., one in which the user signal is multiplied by a fast code sequence. However, the new code sequence is the Discrete Fourier Transform of a binary, say, Walsh Hadamard code sequence, so it has complex values.

Figure: Alternative implementation of a Multi-Carrier spread-spectrum transmitter, using the Direct sequence principle.

Receiver design
Because of delay spread and frequency

dispersion due to multipath fading, subcarriers are received with different amplitudes. An importance aspect of the receiver design is how to treat the individual subcarriers, depending on their amplitude i. Options are

Linear combining, by weighting the ith subcarrier by a factor di according to o Maximum Ratio Combining: di = i. This optimally combats noise, but does not exploit interference nulling. (See also MRC diversity) o Equal Gain: di = 1. The simplest solution. (See also EGC diversity) o Equalization: di = 1/i. This perfectly restores orthogonality and nulls interference, but excessively boosts noise. 2 o Wiener filtering: di = i/(i + c). This gives the best post-combiner signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio. Maximum likelihood detection

Doppler
See also our page on MC-CDMA with Doppler, i.e., with rapid time variations of the channel.

What are the advantages of MC-CDMA?

Compared to Direct Sequence (DS) CDMA. DS-CDMA is a method to share spectrum among multiple simultaneous users. Moreover, it can exploit frequency diversity, using a RAKE receiver. However, in a dispersive multipath channel, DS-CDMA with a spread factor N can accommodate N simultaneous users only if highly complex interference cancellation techniques are used. In practice this is difficult to implement. MCCDMA can handle N simultaneous users with good BER, using standard receiver techniques. Compared to OFDM. To avoid excessive bit errors on subcarriers that are in a deep fade, OFDM typically applies coding. Hence, the number of subcarriers needed is larger than the number of bits or symbols transmitted simultaneously. MC-CDMA replaces this encoder by an NxN matrix operation. Our initial results reveal an improved BER.

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Chapter: Wireless Channels Section: Propagation Mechanisms

Multipath Reception
Experiments with mobile communication were done at VHF frequencies, near 50 MHz, already in the 1920s. Results of these tests revealed a very hostile propagation environment, particularly in urban centers. The signal quality varied from "excellent" to "no signal". Moving the vehicle over a few meters resulted in dramatic changes of the received field strength. The mobile or indoor radio channel is characterized by 'multipath reception': The signal offered to the receiver contains not only a direct line-of-sight radio wave, but also a large number of reflected radio waves. Even worse in urban centers, the line-ofsight is often blocked by obstacles, and a collected of differently delayed waves is all what is received by a mobile antenna. These reflected waves interfere with the direct wave, which causes significant degradation of the performance of the link. If the antenna moves the channel varies with location and time, because the relative phases of the reflected waves change. This leads to fading: time variations of the received amplitude and phase. In a non-fading (thus fixed) radio channel the BER decreases rapidly when the signal-to-noise (or signal-to-interference) ratio is increased. In a fading channel, every

now and then the received signal is very weak and many bit errors occur. This phenomenon remains present, even if the (average) signal-to-noise ratio is large. So the BER only improves very slowly, and with a fixed slope, if plotted on a log-log scale. (Diversity or error correction can help to make the slope steeper, hence improve performance.) A wireless system has to be designed in such way that the adverse effect of multipath fading is minimized. In the past, multipath has notoriously hindered the development of reliable and inexpensive mass-product systems. A better understanding of these phenomena, and the advent of powerful signal processing techniques contributed to the explosion of digital wireless communication since the 1980s.

The basic model of Rayleigh fading assumes a received multipath signal to consist of a (theoretically infinitely) large number of reflected waves with independent and identically distributed inphase and quadrature amplitudes. This model has played a major role in our understanding of mobile propagation. The model was first proposed in a comment paper written by Lord Rayleigh in 1889, describing the resulting signal if many violinists in an orchestra play in unison, long before its application to mobile radio reception was recognized.

Lord Rayleigh, "On the resultant of a large number of vibrations of the same pitch and of arbitrary phase", Phil. Mag., Vol. 10, August 1880, pp. 73-78 and Vol. 27, June 1889, pp. 460-469.

More recently, this model of many randomly phased sinusoids appeared to appropriately describe the wireless radio channel, and to allow calculation of outage probabilities, fade durations and many other critical parameters of wireless links. It greatly facilitated the development systems that can reliably communicate despite the anomalies and unpredictability of the mobile communication channel. As the demand for mobile communication increases, systems have to be more efficient and cell sizes are chosen smaller and smaller. To describe microcellular propagation, the Rayleigh model lacked the effect of a dominant line-ofsight component, and Rician model appeared to be more appropriate.

Multipath modeling. 1'17"

Although channel fading is experienced as an unpredictable and stochastic phenomenon to the user or the system planner, powerful models have been developed that can accurately predict average system performance. Countermeasures can be used to avoid system failure, even if the channel exhibits fades at particular frequencies of particular locations. Multipath reception leads to "fades" which are spots where the signal is weak. Such fades usually are limited in spatial dimension and frequency bandwidth.

Quicktime

Most conventional digital modulation techniques are sensitive to intersymbol interference unless the channel symbol rate is small compared to the delay spread of the channel. On the other hand a narrowband signal with bit durations much longer than the delay spread may vanish completely in fade. A signal received at a frequency and location where reflected waves cancel each other, is heavily attenuated and may thus suffer large bit error rates.

Models for multipath reception

Narrowband Rayleigh, or Rician models mostly address the channel behavior at one frequency only. Time dispersion, or the Doppler spread is the critical phenomenon. Frequency dispersion and intersymbol interference, on the other hand, are modeled by the delay spread. A model that combines these aspects is the scatter diagram. See also: Table of Contents; chapter on channel modeling

The effect of multipath reception

for a fast moving user: rapid fluctuations of the signal amplitude and phase dispersion and intersymbol interference

for a wideband (digital)

signal: for an analog television signal: for a MultiCarrier signal: "ghost" images (shifted slightly to the right) different attenuation at different (sub)carriers and at different locations good reception at some locations and frequencies; poor reception at other locations and frequencies. strong delayed reflections may cause a severe miscalculation of the distance between user and satellite. This can result in a wrong "fix", i.e., a wrong estimate of the position.

for a stationary user of a narrowband system:

for a satellite positioning system:

Exercise

After you studied the pages of Rayleigh fading, have a look at our design exercise and quizzes.

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website 1993, 1995, 1999

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Chapter: Analog and Digital Transmission

Multi-Carrier Modulation
Multi-Carrier Modulation (MCM) is the principle of transmitting data by dividing the stream into several bit streams, each of which has a much lower bit rate, and by using these substreams to modulate several carriers. The first systems using MCM were military HF radio links in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A special form of MCM, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), with densely spaced subcarriers with overlapping spectra of the modulating signal, was patented in the U.S. in 1970. OFDM abandoned the use of steep bandpass filters that completely separated the spectrum of individual subcarriers, as it was common practice in older Frequency Division Multiplexing systems (e.g. in analogue SSB telephone trunks) and still occurs in (asynchronous) Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) private radiosystems. Instead, OFDM time-domain waveforms are chosen such that mutual orthogonality is ensured even though spectra may overlap. It appeared that such waveform can be generated using a Fast Fourier Transform at the transmitter and receiver. For a relatively long time, the practicality of the concept appeared limited. Implementation aspects such as the complexity of a (Fast) Fourier Transform, appeared prohibitive, not to speak about other problems, such as the stability of oscillators in transmitter and receiver, the linearity required in RF power amplifiers, and the power back-off associated with this. After many years of further intensive research in the 1980's, today we appear to be on the verge of a breakthrough of MCM techniques. Many of the implementational problems appear solvable and MCM has become part of several standards.

Progress in Multi-Carrier Modulation

MCM benefited from considerable research interest for the military applications, but certainly to a much lesser extent than direct-sequence (DS) spread spectrum. The current overwhelming attention to spread spectrum and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) can at least partly be explained by many years of active exploration of this field in military labs. CDMA led to new insight in communication theory, that proved extremely valuable for finding reliable and efficient transmission methods suitable for adverse, i.e., both dispersive and time-varying, mobile communication

channels with severe limitations by interference. DS-CDMA and MCM have in common that investigation into both schemes heavily relies on the insight in communications provided by Shannon, in particular, in his "geometric" theory, considering waveforms to be a point in a Euclidean space, allowing definitions of orthogonality. It was known from earlier experiments with wireless data transmission that the selection of the modulation technique is highly critical. In the early days of mobile communications, many attempts to connect a telephone modem to a cellular phone failed miserably, mainly because of the poor anticipation to the mobile channel anomalies. Although entrepreneurs rapidly recognized the demand for wireless data communications, experiments and product tests rapidly revealed that the mobile fading channel needed specific solutions, for modulation scheme, bit rates and the packet length. Among the many proposals, Multi- Carrier Modulation appeared one of the most elegant solutions for wireless digital transmission at high symbol rate. The signal waveform used for Multi- Carrier transmission has intriguing properties. The rapid increase in digital signal processing power in (software programmable) radio receivers has opened the way for large scale use of this idea. Nowadays this method is considered to be particularly suitable for high-performance digital radio links.

Special Forms of MCM

Coded MCM

Multi-Carrier Modulation on its own is not the solution to the problems of communication over unreliable multipath channels. The channel time dispersion will excessively attenuate some subcarriers such that the throughput on these subchannels would be unacceptable small. Only if the joint signal of many subcarriers is processed appropriately, the diversity advantages of MCM can be exploited.
MC-CDMA

Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiplexing or Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is another interesting approach is to spread the signal over different subcarriers. It uses DSCDMA merely for multiplexing, but chooses the signal waveforms using the OFDM principle. Signals to different users are added linearly onto a multiplex of MultiCarrier CDMA signals.

MCM Applications

MCM has the elegant waveform properties that make it useful for a wide variety of applications. In particular, we mention digital transmission over telephone lines, applications in broadcasting and in wireless LANs.
Digital Transmission over the Telephone System

MCM has been successfully tested for digital transmission at high rates over the twisted-pair telephone subscriber loop. It is proposed for the Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL).
Digital Audio Broadcasting

The concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) for Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) goes back to the end of the 1980s. Nowadays, experimental systems are in operation, and introduction to the mass-audience is soon to follow. It may substantially improve mobile reception of radio broadcasts. Chipsets for DAB are now being developed in the European JESSE project, a necessary step towards mass production of receivers at low price. Marketeers previously noticed that the introduction of a new technology is often more successful if it replaces an old existing service than if it only offers previously unknown services. But in our personal opinion, improved mobile radio reception by itself may not guarantee the real breakthrough of digital broadcasting. A lesson learned from High-Definition Television (HDTV) was that quality of reception is not the main motivation for customers to replace their equipment. However novel multimedia oriented services can easily be introduced once DAB is operational, which may appear to be a substantial market. Presumably, one of the reasons to choose OFDM as the DAB standard was the possibility to deploy single frequency networks. As MCM is robust against fading caused by natural multipath, it can also work if signals are received from two different transmitter sites: the mutual interference is simply experienced as artificial multipath reception. This

possibility guarantees very efficient use of scarce radio spectrum, particularly if nationwide coverage is aimed at.
Digital Television

Developments in MPEG-2 video encoding showed that good quality television signals can be distributed over a channel of 3 to 8 Mbit/s. Multi-Carrier signals with FFT sizes on the order of 2k to 8k points have been proposed as the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard to ensure reliable mobile reception of digital Terrestrial Television broadcasting (DTTB). As far as we can see, business plans for the introduction of DTTB appear not yet to be fully worked out. Mobile reception of television broadcasts may not justify the enormous costs of replacing the broadcast infrastructure: within DVB, marketing interests appear to focus on provision of television services over cable, the twisted pair telephone subscriber loop, or directly via satellite.
Wireless Local Area Networks

MCM was not adopted as a standard for the European HIgh PErformance Radio LAN (HIPERLAN), presumably because of the need for highly linear RF amplifiers which are difficult to build with the limited power available for PCMCIA add- ons. However, HIPERLAN II and the Wireless 1394 standards adopted OFDM transmission. The deregulation of the use of Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands for communication allows many manufacturers to develop their own wireless equipment, independent of the time-consuming standardization processes, that are mostly dominated by commercial interests of a few major players. It is particularly in this field that many small companies in the U.S. are researching novel modulation methods and improved access methods, including OFDM and MC-CDMA.

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Jean-Paul M.G. Linnartz, 1993, 1995. JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Chapter: Analog and Digital Transmission Section: Multi-Carrier Modulation, CDMA, MC-CDMA

Multi Carrier CDMA Performance

see also: analysis

Figure: Local-mean Bit Error Rate for MC-CDMA versus Eb/N0 in a dispersive Rayleigh-fading channel with independent fading at adjacent subcarriers. Synchronous downlink with spread factor N and N simultaneous users. Receiver: adaptive wiener filtering. (1) Analytical expression for infinitely many subcarriers (2) 64 subcarriers (N = 64) (3) Single subcarrier, same result as average BER in slowly fading, non-dispersive Rayleigh fading channel (4) Standard erfc function for AWGN LTI non-dispersive channel

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Chapter: Analog and Digital Transmission Section: CDMA, Direct Sequence CDMA

Code Sequences for Direct Sequence CDMA

with contributions by Frank Kamperman. In Direct-Sequence CDMA, the user signal is multiplied by a pseudo-noise code sequence of high bandwidth. This code sequence is also called the chip sequence. The resulting coded signal is transmitted over the radio channel.

Figure: User signal and code are multiplied to generate the coded transmit signal.

Code Properties
Autocorrelation The (normalized) autocorrelation of the spreading waveform p(t) is defined by
Rc() = 1 T inf int p(t) p(t + ) 0 dt

where p(t) is the transmit waveform of the code, T = Nc Tc is the code period time and represents a time shift.

Partial Autocorrelation If a bit transition occurs (from +1 to -1 or vice versa), the interference from a delay CDMA signal consists of two fractions of a bit duration. The Partial Autocorrelation is similar to the above formula, but integrated only of a portion of the bit duration. Crosscorrelation Different signals have different spreading codes. The crosscorrelation between two codes i and j is
Rc() = 1 T inf int pi(t) pj(t + ) 0 dt

which equals the autocorrelation if i = j.

Codes Used for CDMA

Popular code sequences used in spread-spectrum transmission are

Maximum Length sequences Walsh Hadamard sequences Gold codes, and Kasami codes.

The names "Pseudo-Noise" (PN) and "maximal-length" are used in some papers synonymously, while other authors use the name PN sequences to indicate a very broad class of sequences, including for instance ML and Gold sequences. The user capacity of a synchronous CDMA system, in which the various user signals exhibit no time offsets when they arrive at the receiver, is limited by the number of different codes. With a spread factor Nand Nu users, perfectly orthogonal codes can chosen if Nu is less or equal to N. Welch derived a bound for the maximum normalized cross correlation Rmax (at zero time offset) between user codes
Rmax2 = (Nu/N) - 1 -----------Nu - 1

For Walsh-Hadamard codes N = Nu, so Rmax =0, and for Gold codes N = Nu - 1, so Rmax=1/N. Synchronous CDMA is used in the downlink of cellular systems, but

multipath reception can destroy the time alignment of components travelling over different paths. In asynchronous CDMA, codes arrive in a time-shifted manner, and the crosscorrelation values typically are much larger. Asynchronous CDMA occurs in the uplink of cellular systems.

Maximal Length (ML or m) sequences

ML codes are well understood and have a number of properties which are useful in their application to spread-spectrum systems. For instance

ML code sequences can simply be generated by a shift register with feedback. ML linear feedback shift-register sequences have very low autocorrelation values. This implies that o ML sequences can be used in systems that need to operate in channels with large delay spreads in multipath channels, see e.g. the rake receiver. o the synchronisation performance is good

See also the page about ML-codes.

Walsh-Hadamard Sequences
If perfectly synchronized with respect to each other, W-H codes are perfectly orthogonal. That is, W-H are optimal codes to avoid interference among users in the link from base station to terminals. The simplest matrix of 2 orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard sequences is
1 C1 = [ 1 -1 1 ]

The code of user 1 is the first column, i.e., (1, 1), the code of user 2 is the second column, i.e., (1, -1). Clearly (1, 1) is orthogonal to (1, -1). This matrix can be extended using a recursive technique. For 2nusers, the matrix is found from the code matrix for 2(n - 1) users, according to
C(n-1) Cn = [ C(n-1) ]

C(n-1)

-C(n-1)

Gold Codes
Gold sequences have been proposed by Gold in 1967 and 1968. These are constructed by EXOR-ing two m-sequences of the same length with each other. Gold sequences have favorable cross-correlation properties. See also the page about Gold-codes.

Criteria to select a particular code

In synchronous DS-CDMA, the link performance is affected by

Multi-User interference the asynchronous multipath interference, arising from the delayed signals from o the other users as well as o user himself

As the user capacity of the channel is limited by the interference, we would like to make the partial cross-correlations of codes small, ideally zero for all time shifts. The values that the partial crosscorrelation functions take on depend upon the choice of codes. For example, Walsh codes have the desirable property of perfect orthogonality at zero phase offset, but have poor autocorrelation properties for other phase offsets. Moreover, Walsh codes do not spread the signal uniformly over the spectrum. To counteract this, one scheme has been proposed, e.g. for IS95, whereby each user's code consists of his unique Walsh code modulated by a ML sequence common to all users. Good autocorrelation properties are also crucial for timing recovery and coherent detection.

References

D.V. Sarwate and M.B. Pursley, "Crosscorrelation properties of pseudorandom and related sequences", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 68, No. 5, May 1980, pp. 593-619. R. Gold, "Optimal binary sequences for spread spectrum multiplexing," IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. IT-13, pp. 619-621, 1967.

M.B Pursley, "Performance evaluation for phase coded spread-spectrum multiple access communication - Part I: System Analysis," IEEE Trans. Comm., COM-25 (August 1977), pp. 795-799. E. Geraniotis and B. Ghaffari, "Performance of binary and quaternary direct sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access systems with random signature sequences," IEEE Trans. Comm., COM-39, No. 5, pp. 713-724, May 1991. D.V. Sarwate et al, "Partial correlation effects in direct-sequence multipleaccess communication systems," IEEE Trans. Comm., COM-32, No. 5, pp. 567573, May 1984. F.D. Garber, M.B. Pursley, "Optimal phases of maximal-length sequences for asynchronous spread - spectrum multiplexing," Electron. Lett., Vol. 16, pp. 756-757, Sept. 1980.

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Jean-Paul M.G. Linnartz and Frank Kamperman, 1993, 1995.

JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website Jean-Paul M.G. Linnartz, 1993, 1995.