DS/CDMA successive interference cancellation

Conventional DS/CDMA detectors operate by enhancing a desired user while suppressing other users, considered as interference (multiple access interference, MAI) or noise. A different viewpoint is to consider other users not as noise but to jointly detect all users´ signals (multiuser detection). This has significant potential of increasing capacity and near/far resistance. Optimal multiuser detection is, however, too complex to implement, thus motivating the search for suboptimal algorithms. Our objective is to underline the need for simplicity and to discuss what is a relatively simple form of multiuser detection (at the base station of a cellular system), successive interference cancellation. The cancellation scheme uses only components already present in a conventional detector