Performance evaluation of wideband CDMA air interface

The mobile community is currently gearing towards third-generation (3G) and beyond, promising upgraded and seamless integration of a wide variety of communication services for consumers worldwide. 3G systems have been implemented in some European and Asian countries but the development in Malaysia is still in its infancy. The 3G system is based on the wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) air interface platform which is backward compatible with the second-generation (2G) global system for mobile communications (GSM) networks. Therefore, a simple user-friendly WCDMA simulator has been built; it is deemed necessary and invaluable for research purposes involving the performance of the 3G system. This paper investigates the simulated performance of the WCDMA system at both the forward and reverse channels for different channel conditions in a multiuser environment. Simple matched filtering and RAKE diversity combining is implemented at the receiver. Performance improvement due to error correction coding is also shown.