Performance of MMSE Receiver Based CDMA System with Higher Order Modulation Formats in a Fading Channel

This paper studies the effect of using higher order modulation formats on the performance of minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver based direct-sequence (DS) code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems at different loading levels in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and slow fading channels. The performance of BPSK, QPSK, and 16QAM modulation formats are compared and analytical and simulation results are presented in terms of the bit error rates (BER) for these different modulation formats. A comparison of the rejection of the near-far effects for each modulation scheme is also presented. The main contribution of this paper is in showing that user capacity may be increased by using higher order modulation schemes to cause the MMSE receiver to operate away from the interference limiting region. In particular it is shown that under high loading levels, 16QAM outperforms QPSK and BPSK for identical bandwidth and information rate, while at moderate loading levels, QPSK represents the best option. A combination of pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) and linear prediction are used to estimate the fading process. A general structure of the MMSE receiver capable of demodulating a wide range of digital modulation formats in this type of environment is presented.