The performance of multi-user cooperative diversity in an asynchronous CDMA uplink

This paper investigates the impact of inter-user non-orthogonality and asynchronous communication on the information-outage probability performance of multi-user decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative diversity in a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) uplink. Each user in the proposed system transmits its own data towards the base station and also serves as a relay for other users. We assume full-duplex communication so that each user can transmit and receive simultaneously at the same frequency. Each user attempts to decode the messages of a plurality of other users and forwards the superposition of multiple re-encoded and re-spread messages. Our cooperative scheme employs a sub-optimum decorrelating receiver to suppress the multi-user interference at both the base station and the relay-side. We evaluate the information-outage probability performance of the proposed scheme in an underloaded, fully-loaded and overloaded CDMA uplink. We consider combining schemes at the base station where the source information is code combined with the relayed information, while the information from multiple relays is either code combined or diversity combined. Under the system parameters contemplated in this paper, diversity combining of the relayed information is nearly as good as code combining because of the associated probabilities of decoding at the relays. We then examine the effect of using practical modulation formats on the information-outage probability performance of the proposed DF multi-user sharing scheme under diversity combining. We see that the performance loss due to modulation constraints and the use of diversity combining instead of code combining is relatively small.