Playing with Blocks: A New Combination of Block Transmission and the CDMA Multiple Access Technique

This paper proposes a combination of the Single Carrier (SC) block transmission and the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technique. Performance comparisons with the traditional SC DS- CDMA block transmission system are presented. A key feature of the proposed transmission technique is that, unlike SC DS-CDMA transmissions, the original code orthogonality between users is preserved despite propagation through multipath frequency selective channels, thus ideally allowing the decoupling of the signals at the receiver side. Besides this advantage, and mostly due to it, the performance results indicate a clear superiority of the proposed system over the traditional SC DS-CDMA. The simulation results consider frequency domain MMSE (Minimum Mean Squared Error) equalization and assume perfect knowledge of the transmission channels.