To spread or not to spread in a wireless data network

Performance comparisons are provided for different receivers in a time-slotted mobile network designed to carry delay-insensitive traffic. We show that even with one user per timeslot, capacity gains are achieved from some degree of spreading and multiuser detection against no-spreading and also against spreading plus matched filtering. Our results suggest that frequency partitioning between cells may be superior still, for the scenario considered in the present paper. However, our results also suggest that with optimal scheduling of users (not included in our model) full frequency reuse and no spreading may be optimal, but this issue requires further study