Performance of successive interference cancellation in convolutionally coded multicarrier DS/CDMA systems

This letter presents a successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme for a multicarrier (MC) asynchronous DS/CDMA system, wherein the output of a convolutional encoder modulates bandlimited spreading waveforms at different subcarrier frequencies. In every subband, the SIC receiver successively detects the interferers' signals and subtracts them from that of the user-of-interest. The SIC receiver employs maximal-ratio combining (SIC-MRC) for detection of the desired user, and feeds a soft decision Viterbi decoder. A comparison is made among SIC-MRC, matched filter detection with MRC (MF-MRC), and N-tap minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receivers with optimal tap coefficients, assuming a slowly varying, frequency selective, Rayleigh fading channel, where N is the processing gain. Analysis and simulation results show that the SIC-MRC can obtain performance close to that of N-tap MMSE receivers, and both of them have better ability to suppress multiple-access interference (MAI) than does MF-MRC. Finally, with timing or phase tracking errors, results show that SIC-MRC can still retain a performance advantage over MF-MRC.