Interoperability and capacities of coexisting W-CDMA and CDMA2000 3rd-generation wireless cellular systems

This paper examines the interoperability between, and the coexistence of, the two primary third-generation (3G) wireless cellular systems in a shared spectrum. The two 3G systems are wideband-code division multiple access (W-CDMA) and code division multiple access2000 (CDMA2000). These two systems have different signaling characteristics and are not interoperable, but both use code division multiple access (CDMA). Due to the inherent nature of CDMA, it is feasible for W-CDMA and CDMA2000 to coexist with each other albeit with a predictable degradation in performance. This paper describes the signaling characteristics of the two 3G systems that prevent signal interoperability between them. The paper then shows that W-CDMA and CDMA2000 can coexist, and quantifies the degradation in the capacity for each system as users of the other system are added within the shared spectrum. The capacity is determined both analytically and using matrix laboratory (MATLAB) based simulations.