A comparison between chip fractional and non-fractional sampling for a direct sequence CDMA receiver

This paper examines the effects of chip fractional (CF) and chip non-fractional (CNF) sampling on the performance of a CDMA uplink receiver. The impact of the receiver front end filter, which is sampling rate dependent, is investigated. Models for burst and continuous transmissions are introduced. The discrete-time equivalent channels between the various users and the receiver are assumed to be known. First, the mutual information between the emitted sequences of symbols and the received sequence is investigated. It is analytically shown that the receiver systematically loses information in case of CNF sampling. Second, we have demonstrated that the CF receiver always achieves better performance in terms of minimum mean square error (MMSE) for both linear and decision feedback (DF) structures. A closed-form expression of the gain in performance is provided for the two metrics; under consideration. The importance of the gain due to CF sampling is also illustrated by means of computations for multipath channels. For a typical system setup, a gain of 0.1 bits per emitted symbol is observed for the mutual information. Considering the geometrical mean of symbol SINRs in case of linear and DF joint detection (JD) for a roll-off factor equal to 0.3, a gain of 0.4 dB arises for the CF linear detector, and a gain of 0.2 dB arises for the CF DF detector.