Performance of successive interference cancellation for a multicarrier DS/CDMA system

We present a successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme for a multicarrier (MC) DS CDMA system. In every subband, the SIC receiver successively detects the interferers´ signals and substracts them from the user-of-interest. A comparison is made among SIC, matched filter detection with an equal gain combiner (MF-EGC), matched filter followed by maximal-ratio combining (MF-MRC) and minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receivers with optimal tap coefficients. For this latter receiver, we determine the performance both when the number of taps equals the processing gain, denoted by N, and when the number of taps is roughly one-half of the processing gain. By analysis and simulation, it is shown that the SIC has better ability to suppress multiple-access interference (MAI) than do MF and [N/2]-tap MMSE in single carrier (SC) CDMA, and MF-EGC, MF-MRC and [N/2]-tap MMSE in MC CDMA, and this translates to increased capacity and better fading resistance. Further, SIC and N-tap MMSE yield approximately the same performance in SC CDMA, but SIC has a poorer performance than does an N-tap MMSE in MC CDMA. In addition, we derive results for the performance degradation that a SIC scheme experiences in MC CDMA due to both phase and timing tracking errors. It is shown that with small tracking errors, SIC can still retain a performance advantage over MF-EGC and MF-MRC, although the advantage of SIC decreases with increasing tracking errors