Performance evaluation of DS-CDMA systems on multipath propagation channels with multilevel spreading sequences and RAKE receivers

Performance of small-cell wireless direct sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems with multilevel spreading sequences is investigated. An analytical methodology to evaluate both outage probability and mean bit error probability is presented; and its results are compared to those obtained with a semianalytical Monte Carlo based approach. Multipath propagation, the exact correlation properties of spreading codes, and both the simple correlator and RAKE receivers are taken into account in the analysis, which is oriented to asynchronous and synchronous environments. The spreading sequences investigated include multilevel sequences with complex isomorphic mapping, as well as some well-known two-level sequences. The numerical results show the impact of multilevel sequences on system performance, the improvements found in the absence of multiple access interference by using them rather than binary sequences, and the agreement between analytical and semianalytical evaluation.