TCM/SSMA communication systems with cascaded sequences and PAM/QAM signal sets

An expression in matrix form for the multiple-access interference (MAI) in an asynchronous direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS/SSMA) communication system with cascaded sequences (CVs), arbitrary chip waveforms, and trellis-coded modulation (TCM) with a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal set is obtained. TCM provides significant coding gain while the CVs decrease the correlation between the MAI of adjacent data intervals. The expression is used to calculate arbitrarily accurate probability density functions (PDFs) of the MAI in the TCM system and to derive an accurate approximation of the MAI variance. It also helps illustrate some properties of the MAI by separating contributing parameters into different matrices. We derive an approximation of the upper union bound on the bit-error probability and investigate its applicability. The results show that CV schemes can greatly reduce the pairwise error probabilities (PEPs) until the length of the CV becomes greater than that of the error weight sequence (EWS) under consideration.