Reverse-link capacity with MRC-based macrodiversity in DS-CDMA cellular systems

In this paper, the effect of maximal ratio combining (MRC)-based macrodiversity on CDMA reverse-link capacity is studied. We present an analytical model and derive the exact outage probability expression. Both fast fading and log-normal shadowing fading are considered. The numerical results show that with MRC-based macrodiversity the reverse-link capacity increases rapidly with the number of involved base stations. Besides, we make a comparison between the capacity with microdiversity and that with MRC-based macrodiversity and find that with the same amount of antennas, more reverse-link capacity can be obtained with MRC-based macrodiversity.