Soft Linear Precoding for the Downlink of DS/CDMA Communication Systems

In this paper, we propose a transmitter-based linear-precoding scheme that outperforms conventional precoding by making use of a portion of the interference between the users in a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system downlink. The utilization of part of the interference is achieved by selectively orthogonalizing the desired symbols to destructive interference by means of precoding while allowing interference that constructively contributes to the useful signal's energy. The existence and exploitation of constructive interference effectively spreads the signal constellation and enhances the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the receiver. SINR improvement is attained with no need for additional power-per-user investment at the transmitter since energy that is inherent in the CDMA system is utilized. The scheme introduced in this paper applies to the downlink of cellular phase-shift keying (PSK)-based CDMA systems. Theoretical analysis and comparative simulations show that significant performance improvement can be attained with the proposed technique.