Sensitivity of multiple-access techniques to narrow-band interference

This paper investigates the sensitivity of several multiple-access techniques to narrow-band interference. The analysis covers time-division multiple access (TDMA), code-division multiple access (CDMA), and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). The study is carried out under the assumption that all the considered multiple-access systems occupy the same total bandwidth, and the bit rates of all active users are identical. A major finding of this study is that CDMA with pseudonoise spreading sequences is more sensitive to narrow-band interference than TDMA. We point out that the signal-to-jammer power ratio at the decision device input is in fact identical for both multiple-access techniques, but the amplitude distribution of the jammer term at the threshold detector input is more favorable to TDMA, which turns out to be more robust in terms of bit-error rate. Another finding is that in terms of sensitivity to narrow-band interference, orthogonal CDMA (OCDMA) is closer to TDMA than to CDMA with pseudonoise sequences, because the degradation is not the same for all users. Finally, we discuss the relationship of OCDMA and TDMA and highlight the superiority, in terms of capacity over the narrow-band interference channel, of TDMA to the other multiple-access techniques considered in this paper.