Performance improvement with random insertion of power control bits in a CDMA forward traffic channel

In a forward traffic channel of an IS-95 system, coded symbols are randomly punctured after interleaving to transmit power control bits for the reverse channel. The random puncturing results in performance degradation of the forward link and a frame error rate floor even on an AWGN channel. This paper proposes a new scheme to transmit the power control bits in a CDMA forward traffic channel. To compare the performance of the multiplexing schemes, we present a method to compute the upper bound on the frame error rate of convolutional codes. By numerical analysis and simulations, we show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than that of the random puncturing used in the IS-95 system.