Performance of wireless CDMA with M-ary orthogonal modulation and cell site antenna arrays

An antenna array-based base station receiver structure for wireless direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) with M-ary orthogonal modulation is proposed. The base station uses an antenna array beamformer-RAKE structure with noncoherent equal gain combining. The receiver consists of a "front end" beamsteering processor feeding a conventional noncoherent RAKE combiner. The performance of the proposed receiver with closed loop power control in multipath fading channels is evaluated. Expressions for the system uncoded bit-error probability (BEP) as a function of the number of users, number of antennas, and the angle spread are derived for different power control scenarios. The system capacity in terms of number of users that can be supported for a given uncoded BEP is also evaluated. Analysis results show a performance improvement in terms of the system capacity due to the use of antenna arrays and the associated signal processing at the base station. In particular, analysis results show an increase in system capacity that is proportional to the number of antennas. They also show an additional performance improvement due to space diversity gain provided by the array for nonzero angle spreads.