Performance Evaluation for Forward-Link Cellular DS-CDMA over Frequency-Selective Nakagami Multipath Fading Channels

The bit-error rate (BER) for a forward-link cellulardirect-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systemis evaluated. This analysis takes into account the effects ofmulti-cell interference resulting from Nakagami multipath fading,frequency selectivity, path loss and mobile user spatialdistribution. Exponentially decaying multipath intensityprofile (MIP) is adopted in the model to investigate itssignificance on the overall performance. In order to evaluatethe BER performance efficiently, saddlepoint integration (SPI)is applied in the analysis. By fixing the number of resolvablemultipaths and varying the number of fingers for the RAKEreceiver, it can be shown that the capacity of a DS-CDMAcellular system increases almost linearly with the number ofRAKE fingers.