Spectral efficiency of MIMO multiaccess systems with single-user decoding

The use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver is considered for the uplink of cellular communication systems. The achievable spectral efficiency in bits/s/Hz is used as the criterion for comparing various design choices. The focus is on wideband code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems when the receiver uses the matched-filter or the minimum mean-squared error detector, followed by single-user decoders. The spreading sequences of the CDMA system are assumed to be random across the users, but could be dependent across the transmit antennas of each user. Using analytical results in the large system asymptote, guidelines are provided for the sequence design across the transmit antennas and for choosing the number of antennas. In addition, comparisons are made between (random) CDMA and orthogonal multiaccess with multiple antennas. It is shown that CDMA, even with single-user decoding, can outperform orthogonal multiaccess when the number of receive antennas is sufficiently large.