Suboptimal maximum-likelihood multiuser detection of synchronous CDMA on frequency-selective multipath channels

We propose a signal processing technique, based on the estimate-maximize algorithm, in order to perform multiuser code-division multiple-access (CDMA) detection. This algorithm iteratively seeks for the maximum-likelihood solution. The resulting structure is a successive interference cancellation scheme which can be applied to both synchronous and asynchronous CDMA. Higher performance than similar methods is obtained from using deterministic annealing and multiple stages. A soft output is defined, and the signal-to-noise ratio in the soft output of the detector is measured for predicting performance with an outer code with soft input decoder. The new receiver is applied to the problem whereby in a synchronous CDMA system the orthogonality of the codes is destroyed by a frequency-selective channel, caused by multipath fading. This nonlinear technique is shown to perform much better than the minimum mean-square-error linear solution and several other algorithms. The algorithm lends itself to an efficient DSP or VLSI implementation. We evaluate the performance by simulations with coherent quadrature phase-shift keying modulation, known channel and long random Rayleigh multipath. In most cases, we set the number of users equal to the processing gain for maximal throughput. The results are also presented in the form of outage probabilities for random Rayleigh multipath against required fading margin.