Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Linear Multiuser Detectors in the Downlink of DS-CDMA Systems Applying Spectral Decomposition

This paper studies the performance of linear multiuser detectors for direct-sequence code division multiple access systems at different loading levels and users' powers, using singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques in the downlink of Rayleigh flat-fading and additive white Gaussian channels. The performance of the matched filter (MF), decorrelator (zero-forcing), and minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) detectors are studied and compared. Analytical and simulation results are also presented in terms of the bit error rate. From this analysis, a simple linear multiuser detector is developed that exploits the structure of the system's spreading codes matrix from the SVD viewpoint. Also, the numerical performance of this proposed detector is compared to that of the conventional detector (MF) as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, the performance limits are established in terms of the singular values of the spreading codes matrix. Extensive simulation results validate the analysis presented in the paper for equal or unequal users' powers.