DS-CDMA chip waveform design for minimal interference under bandwidth, phase, and envelope constraints

This paper investigates the effect of chip waveform shaping on the error performance, bandwidth confinement, phase continuity, and envelope uniformity in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access communication systems employing offset quadrature modulation formats. An optimal design methodology is developed for the problem of minimizing the multiple-access interference power under various desirable signal constraints, including limited 99% and 99.9% power bandwidth occupancies, continuous signal phase, and near-constant envelope. The methodology is based on the use of prolate spheroidal wave functions to obtain a reduced-dimension discrete constrained optimization problem formulation. Numerous design examples are discussed to compare the performance achieved by the optimally-designed chip waveforms with other conventional schemes, such as offset quadrature phase-shift keying, minimum-shift keying (MSK), sinusoidal frequency-shift keying (SFSK), and time-domain raised-cosine pulses. In general, it is found that while the optimized chip pulses achieved substantial gains when no envelope constraints were imposed, these gains vanish when a low envelope fluctuation constraint was introduced. In particular, it is also shown that MSK is quasi-optimal with regard to the 99% bandwidth measure, while the raised-cosine pulse is equally good with both the 99% and 99.9% measures, but at the expense of some envelope variation. On the other hand, SFSK is quasi-optimal with regard to the 99.9% bandwidth occupancy, among the class of constant-to-low envelope variation pulses.