Frequency-hopping versus interference cancellation for TD-CDMA

This work considers asynchronous time division code division multiple access (TD-CDMA) systems with RAKE receivers and one stage of parallel interference cancellation (PIC) or serial interference cancellation (SIC). A general method based on the concept of spherically symmetric signals is presented for the evaluation of the average probability of error of uncoded TD-CDMA systems. Slow frequency-hopping (SFH) with frequency overlap (FO) between adjacent carriers and interference cancellation are also included in the analysis, which considers the multipath Rayleigh fading channel (which models indoor and outdoor vehicular radio propagation). We analyze quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation with coherent demodulation and multipath (frequency) diversity with maximal ratio combining (MRC). Power control, adaptive SFH, and interference cancellation are employed for improving the bit-error rate (BER) performance. It is found that the scheme with SFH, in spite of the FO, always improves the performance substantially, and interference cancellation, in general, provides the highest BER improvement.