Analysis of hardlimiting parallel interference cancellation (PIC) for synchronous CDMA communication

Parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is a widely considered approach to multiuser detection in CDMA communication. While PIC receivers normally involve nonlinear functions, previous performance analyses mainly addressed linear PIC. We find that the performance of purely hardlimiting PIC may not improve after the second stage. In addition, for the two-user case, one stage usually suffices. Further, the performance of hardlimiting PIC does not approach the single-user limit. We also develop approximate expressions for numerical evaluation of the hardlimiting PIC performance. Simulation results agree well with the analysis.