A Cyclodespreader Architecture for Detecting Multiple Downlink Aperiodic CDMA Signals

Although a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system is spectrally efficient and has some immunity against intentional reception, its capacity and performance are generally limited by multiple access interference (MAI) caused by other users. For an aperiodic CDMA system, the spreading sequences span multiple symbol intervals, and the cross-correlations between these sequences, which are a measure of the MAI, are periodic over multiple symbols. In this paper, we present a receiver with a parallel architecture that converts an aperiodic CDMA sequence into a piecewise periodic sequence in each arm. We refer to this receiver as a cyclodespreader because the despreader exploits the cyclostationary property of an aperiodic signal. As a result, the transmitted data can be detected separately in each arm of the receiver using low-complexity conventional algorithms proposed for periodic CDMA systems. The goal of the receiver is to decode several signals received from different cochannel base stations. The performance of the system is evaluated using real aperiodic CDMA signals, and it is compared to that of a conventional matched filter (MF) receiver using the number of correctly decoded messages as the performance measure.