Performance of CDMA with differential detection in the presence of phase noise and multiuser interference

Phase noise can be a major source of performance degradation in low-cost, low-bit-rate digital systems operating in the millimeter wavelength band. The use of code-division multiple access (CDMA) for several new applications is envisaged, and the study of the effects of phase noise shows that even CDMA systems exhibit a performance degradation comparable to that of standard modulation formats. The use of CDMA with a differential modulation at the chip level improves the system performance with a simpler demodulator at the expense of the enhancement of multiuser interference. In this paper we propose a new approach to CDMA modulation, and a possible solution is suggested to obtain a tradeoff between the performance degradation due to the phase noise and to the multiuser interference.