Error control coding and space-time MMSE multiuser detection in DS-CDMA systems

We consider the use of error control coding in direct sequence-code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems that employ multiuser detection (MUD) and space diversity. The relative performance gain between Reed-Solomon (RS) code and convolutional code (CC) is well known in [1] for the single user, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this case, RS codes outperform CC´s at high signal-to-noise ratios. We find that this is not the case for the multiuser interference channel mentioned above. For useful error rates, we find that soft-decision CC´s to be uniformly better than RS codes when used with DS-CDMA modulation in multiuser space-time channels. In our development, we use the Gaussian approximation on the interference to determine performance error bounds for systems with low number of users. Then, we check their accuracy in error rate estimation via system´s simulation. These performance bounds will in turn allow us to consider a large number of users where we can estimate the gain in user-capacity due to channel coding. Lastly, the use of turbo codes is considered where it is shown that they offer a coding gain of 2.5 dB relative to soft-decision CC.