Capacity of complexity-constrained noise-free CDMA

An interference-limited noise-free CDMA downlink channel operating under a complexity constraint on the receiver is introduced. According to this paradigm, detected bits, obtained by performing hard decisions directly on the channel's matched filter output, must be the same as the transmitted binary inputs. This channel setting, allowing the use of the simplest receiver scheme, seems to be worthless, making reliable communication at any rate impossible. We prove, by adopting statistical mechanics notion, that in the large-system limit such a complexity-constrained CDMA channel gives rise to a non-trivial Shannon-theoretic capacity, rigorously analyzed and corroborated using finite-size channel simulations.