TheInfoList

Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a
channel access method In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two terminal (telecommunication), terminals connected to the same transmission medium to transmit over it and to share its capacity. E ...
used by various
radio Radio is the technology of signaling and telecommunication, communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device ...

communication technologies. CDMA is an example of
multiple access In telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty; it answers the question of "What an entity is" and thus defines both its essence and the nature of ...
, where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single communication channel. This allows several users to share a band of frequencies (see
bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
). To permit this without undue interference between the users, CDMA employs
spread spectrum In telecommunication and radio communication, spread-spectrum techniques are methods by which a signal (electrical engineering), signal (e.g., an electrical, electromagnetic, or acoustic signal) generated with a particular Bandwidth (signal pr ...
technology and a special coding scheme (where each transmitter is assigned a code). CDMA optimizes the use of available bandwidth as it transmits over the entire frequency range and does not limit the user's frequency range. It is used as the access method in many mobile phone standards.
IS-95 Interim Standard 95 (IS-95) was the first ever CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two termi ...
, also called "cdmaOne", and its evolution
CDMA2000 CDMA2000 (also known as C2K or IMT Multiâ€‘Carrier (IMTâ€‘MC)) is a family of 3G mobile technology standards for sending voice, data, and signaling In signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focu ...
, are often simply referred to as "CDMA", but
UMTS The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Edu ...

, the 3G standard used by
GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Education * GSM London, a higher education provider * Guildhall School of Music and Drama The Guildhall School of Music and Drama i ...

carriers, also uses "wideband CDMA", or W-CDMA, as well as TD-CDMA and TD-SCDMA, as its radio technologies. It can be also used as a channel or medium access technology, like
ALOHA ''Aloha'' (, ) is the Hawaiian Hawaiian may refer to: * Hawaii state residents, regardless of ancestry * Native Hawaiians, the current term for the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands or their descendants * Hawaiian language Historic uses ...

for example or as a permanent pilot/signalling channel to allow users to synchronize their local oscillators to a common system frequency, thereby also estimating the channel parameters permanently. In these schemes, the message is modulated on a longer spreading sequence, consisting of several chips (0es and 1es). Due to their very advantageous auto- and crosscorrelation characteristics, these spreading sequences have also been used for radar applications for many decades, where they are called
Barker code In communication technology Telecommunication is the transmission of information Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty; it answers the question of "What an entity is" and thus defines both its essence and the ...
s (with a very short sequence length of typically 8 to 32). For space-based communication applications, CDMA has been used for many decades due to the large path loss and Doppler shift caused by satellite motion. Due to these effects, in those applications neither FDMA nor TDMA is typically used as a single modulation. CDMA is often used with BPSK in its simplest form, but can be combined with any modulation scheme like (in advanced cases) QAM or OFDM, which typically makes it very robust and efficient (and equipping them with accurate ranging capabilities, which is difficult without CDMA). Other schemes use subcarriers based on binary offset carrier (BOC), which is inspired by Manchester codes and enable a larger gap between the virtual center frequency and the subcarriers, which is not the case for OFDM subcarriers. Many carriers (such as
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational Multinational may refer to: * Multinational corporation, a corporate organization operating in multiple countries * Multinational force, a military body from multiple countries * Multinational state, a ...
and
Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, Optical system, optical, or ot ...
) will shut down 3G CDMA networks in 2022.

# History

The technology of code-division multiple access channels has long been known. In the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a that spanned during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a of multiple national ; in practice and were highly until its final years. The ...
(USSR), the first work devoted to this subject was published in 1935 by Dmitry Ageev. It was shown that through the use of linear methods, there are three types of signal separation: frequency, time and compensatory. The technology of CDMA was used in 1957, when the young military radio engineer
Leonid Kupriyanovich Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich (, 14 July 1929 â€“ 1 January 1996) was a Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia Eurasia () is the largest ...
in Moscow made an experimental model of a wearable automatic mobile phone, called LK-1 by him, with a base station. LK-1 has a weight of 3 kg, 20â€“30 km operating distance, and 20â€“30 hours of battery life. The base station, as described by the author, could serve several customers. In 1958, Kupriyanovich made the new experimental "pocket" model of mobile phone. This phone weighed 0.5 kg. To serve more customers, Kupriyanovich proposed the device, which he called "correlator." In 1958, the USSR also started the development of the " Altai" national civil mobile phone service for cars, based on the Soviet MRT-1327 standard. The phone system weighed . It was placed in the trunk of the vehicles of high-ranking officials and used a standard handset in the passenger compartment. The main developers of the Altai system were VNIIS (Voronezh Science Research Institute of Communications) and GSPI (State Specialized Project Institute). In 1963 this service started in Moscow, and in 1970 Altai service was used in 30 USSR cities.

# Uses

* Synchronous CDM (code-division 'multiplexing', an early generation of CDMA) was implemented in the
Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. governme ...
(GPS). This predates and is distinct from its use in
mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, or hand phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell or just phone, is a portable telephone A telephone is a telecommunication Telecommunication is the tra ...

s. * The
Qualcomm Qualcomm () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software, and services related to wireless technology. It ow ...

standard
IS-95 Interim Standard 95 (IS-95) was the first ever CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two termi ...
, marketed as cdmaOne. * The Qualcomm standard
IS-2000 CDMA2000 (also known as C2K or IMT Multiâ€‘Carrier (IMTâ€‘MC)) is a family of 3G mobile technology standards for sending voice, data, and signaling In signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focu ...
, known as CDMA2000, is used by several mobile phone companies, including the
Globalstar Globalstar, Inc. is an American satellite communications company that operates a low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an Earth-centered orbit near the planet, often specified as having a period Period may refer to: Common uses * Era, ...
network. * The
UMTS The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Edu ...

3G mobile phone standard, which uses
W-CDMA The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Edu ...
. * CDMA has been used in the OmniTRACS satellite system for transportation
logistics Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics is the management of the flow of things between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requ ...

.

# Steps in CDMA modulation

CDMA is a spread-spectrum multiple-access technique. A spread-spectrum technique spreads the bandwidth of the data uniformly for the same transmitted power. A spreading code is a pseudo-random code that has a narrow
ambiguity functionIn pulsed radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to flight, fly by gaining support from the At ...
, unlike other narrow pulse codes. In CDMA a locally generated code runs at a much higher rate than the data to be transmitted. Data for transmission is combined by bitwise
XOR Exclusive or or exclusive disjunction is a logical operation that is true if and only if its arguments differ (one is true, the other is false). It is symbolized by the prefix operator J and by the infix operators XOR ( or ), EOR, EXOR, â ...
(exclusive OR) with the faster code. The figure shows how a spread-spectrum signal is generated. The data signal with pulse duration of $T_b$ (symbol period) is XORed with the code signal with pulse duration of $T_c$ (chip period). (Note:
bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
is proportional to $1/T$, where $T$ = bit time.) Therefore, the bandwidth of the data signal is $1/T_b$ and the bandwidth of the spread spectrum signal is $1/T_c$. Since $T_c$ is much smaller than $T_b$, the bandwidth of the spread-spectrum signal is much larger than the bandwidth of the original signal. The ratio $T_b/T_c$ is called the spreading factor or processing gain and determines to a certain extent the upper limit of the total number of users supported simultaneously by a base station. Each user in a CDMA system uses a different code to modulate their signal. Choosing the codes used to modulate the signal is very important in the performance of CDMA systems. The best performance occurs when there is good separation between the signal of a desired user and the signals of other users. The separation of the signals is made by the received signal with the locally generated code of the desired user. If the signal matches the desired user's code, then the correlation function will be high and the system can extract that signal. If the desired user's code has nothing in common with the signal, the correlation should be as close to zero as possible (thus eliminating the signal); this is referred to as
cross-correlation In signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analysing, modifying, and synthesizing signals such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal ...

. If the code is correlated with the signal at any time offset other than zero, the correlation should be as close to zero as possible. This is referred to as auto-correlation and is used to reject multi-path interference. An analogy to the problem of multiple access is a room (channel) in which people wish to talk to each other simultaneously. To avoid confusion, people could take turns speaking (time division), speak at different pitches (frequency division), or speak in different languages (code division). CDMA is analogous to the last example where people speaking the same language can understand each other, but other languages are perceived as
noise Noise is unwanted sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and t ...

and rejected. Similarly, in radio CDMA, each group of users is given a shared code. Many codes occupy the same channel, but only users associated with a particular code can communicate. In general, CDMA belongs to two basic categories: synchronous (orthogonal codes) and asynchronous (pseudorandom codes).

# Code-division multiplexing (synchronous CDMA)

The digital modulation method is analogous to those used in simple radio transceivers. In the analog case, a low-frequency data signal is time-multiplied with a high-frequency pure sine-wave carrier and transmitted. This is effectively a frequency convolution (
Wienerâ€“Khinchin theorem In applied mathematics, the Wienerâ€“Khinchin theorem, also known as the Wienerâ€“Khintchine theorem and sometimes as the Wienerâ€“Khinchinâ€“Einstein theorem or the Khinchinâ€“Kolmogorov theorem, states that the autocorrelation function of a wide-s ...
) of the two signals, resulting in a carrier with narrow sidebands. In the digital case, the sinusoidal carrier is replaced by Walsh functions. These are binary square waves that form a complete orthonormal set. The data signal is also binary and the time multiplication is achieved with a simple XOR function. This is usually a mixer in the circuitry. Synchronous CDMA exploits mathematical properties of
orthogonality In mathematics Mathematics (from Ancient Greek, Greek: ) includes the study of such topics as quantity (number theory), mathematical structure, structure (algebra), space (geometry), and calculus, change (mathematical analysis, analysis). ...

between
vectors Vector may refer to: Biology *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism; a disease vector *Vector (molecular biology), a DNA molecule used as a vehicle to artificially carr ...
representing the data strings. For example, the binary string ''1011'' is represented by the vector (1, 0, 1, 1). Vectors can be multiplied by taking their
dot product In mathematics, the dot product or scalar productThe term ''scalar product'' is often also used more generally to mean a symmetric bilinear form, for example for a pseudo-Euclidean space. is an algebraic operation that takes two equal-length seque ...
, by summing the products of their respective components (for example, if u = (''a'', ''b'') and v = (''c'', ''d''), then their dot product uÂ·v = ''ac'' + ''bd''). If the dot product is zero, the two vectors are said to be ''orthogonal'' to each other. Some properties of the dot product aid understanding of how
W-CDMA The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Edu ...
works. If vectors a and b are orthogonal, then $\mathbf\cdot\mathbf = 0$ and: :$\mathbf\cdot\left(\mathbf + \mathbf\right) = \, \mathbf\, ^2,\ \text\ \mathbf\cdot\mathbf + \mathbf\cdot\mathbf = \, \mathbf\, ^2 + 0,$ :$\mathbf\cdot\left(-\mathbf + \mathbf\right) = -\, \mathbf\, ^2,\ \text\ \cdot\mathbf + \mathbf\cdot\mathbf = -\, \mathbf\, ^2 + 0,$ :$\mathbf\cdot\left(\mathbf + \mathbf\right) = \, \mathbf\, ^2,\ \text\ \mathbf\cdot\mathbf + \mathbf\cdot\mathbf = 0 + \, \mathbf\, ^2,$ :$\mathbf\cdot\left(\mathbf - \mathbf\right) = -\, \mathbf\, ^2,\ \text\ \mathbf\cdot\mathbf - \mathbf\cdot\mathbf = 0 - \, \mathbf\, ^2.$ Each user in synchronous CDMA uses a code orthogonal to the others' codes to modulate their signal. An example of 4 mutually orthogonal digital signals is shown in the figure below. Orthogonal codes have a cross-correlation equal to zero; in other words, they do not interfere with each other. In the case of IS-95, 64-bit
Walsh code The Hadamard code is an error-correcting code named after Jacques Hadamard that is used for error detection and correction when transmitting messages over very noisy or unreliable channels. In 1971, the code was used to transmit photos of Mars ...
s are used to encode the signal to separate different users. Since each of the 64 Walsh codes is orthogonal to all other, the signals are channelized into 64 orthogonal signals. The following example demonstrates how each user's signal can be encoded and decoded.

## Example

orthogonal In mathematics, orthogonality is the generalization of the notion of perpendicularity to the linear algebra of bilinear forms. Two elements ''u'' and ''v'' of a vector space with bilinear form ''B'' are orthogonal when . Depending on the bili ...

. (Although mutual orthogonality is the only condition, these vectors are usually constructed for ease of decoding, for example columns or rows from Walsh matrices.) An example of orthogonal functions is shown in the adjacent picture. These vectors will be assigned to individual users and are called the ''code'', ''
chip Chip may refer to: Food * Chip (snack type), thin sliced food, cooked until crunchy ** Potato chip, a thin slice of potato that has been deep fried or baked until crunchy, called a "crisp" in some countries, such as the UK. Also used in some relig ...
code'', or ''chipping code''. In the interest of brevity, the rest of this example uses codes v with only two bits. Each user is associated with a different code, say v. A 1 bit is represented by transmitting a positive code v, and a 0 bit is represented by a negative code âˆ’v. For example, if v = (''v''0, ''v''1) = (1, âˆ’1) and the data that the user wishes to transmit is (1, 0, 1, 1), then the transmitted symbols would be :(v, âˆ’v, v, v) = (''v''0, ''v''1, âˆ’''v''0, âˆ’''v''1, ''v''0, ''v''1, ''v''0, ''v''1) = (1, âˆ’1, âˆ’1, 1, 1, âˆ’1, 1, âˆ’1). For the purposes of this article, we call this constructed vector the ''transmitted vector''. Each sender has a different, unique vector v chosen from that set, but the construction method of the transmitted vector is identical. Now, due to physical properties of interference, if two signals at a point are in phase, they add to give twice the amplitude of each signal, but if they are out of phase, they subtract and give a signal that is the difference of the amplitudes. Digitally, this behaviour can be modelled by the addition of the transmission vectors, component by component. If sender0 has code (1, âˆ’1) and data (1, 0, 1, 1), and sender1 has code (1, 1) and data (0, 0, 1, 1), and both senders transmit simultaneously, then this table describes the coding steps: Because signal0 and signal1 are transmitted at the same time into the air, they add to produce the raw signal :(1, âˆ’1, âˆ’1, 1, 1, âˆ’1, 1, âˆ’1) + (âˆ’1, âˆ’1, âˆ’1, âˆ’1, 1, 1, 1, 1) = (0, âˆ’2, âˆ’2, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0). This raw signal is called an interference pattern. The receiver then extracts an intelligible signal for any known sender by combining the sender's code with the interference pattern. The following table explains how this works and shows that the signals do not interfere with one another: Further, after decoding, all values greater than 0 are interpreted as 1, while all values less than zero are interpreted as 0. For example, after decoding, data0 is (2, âˆ’2, 2, 2), but the receiver interprets this as (1, 0, 1, 1). Values of exactly 0 mean that the sender did not transmit any data, as in the following example: Assume signal0 = (1, âˆ’1, âˆ’1, 1, 1, âˆ’1, 1, âˆ’1) is transmitted alone. The following table shows the decode at the receiver: When the receiver attempts to decode the signal using sender1's code, the data is all zeros; therefore the cross-correlation is equal to zero and it is clear that sender1 did not transmit any data.

# Asynchronous CDMA

When mobile-to-base links cannot be precisely coordinated, particularly due to the mobility of the handsets, a different approach is required. Since it is not mathematically possible to create signature sequences that are both orthogonal for arbitrarily random starting points and which make full use of the code space, unique "pseudo-random" or "pseudo-noise" sequences called spreading sequences are used in ''asynchronous'' CDMA systems. A spreading sequence is a binary sequence that appears random but can be reproduced in a deterministic manner by intended receivers. These spreading sequences are used to encode and decode a user's signal in asynchronous CDMA in the same manner as the orthogonal codes in synchronous CDMA (shown in the example above). These spreading sequences are statistically uncorrelated, and the sum of a large number of spreading sequences results in ''multiple access interference'' (MAI) that is approximated by a Gaussian noise process (following the
central limit theorem In probability theory Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by express ...
in statistics).
Gold code A Gold code, also known as Gold sequence, is a type of binary sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order theory, order matters. Like a Set (mathematics), set, it contains E ...
s are an example of a spreading sequence suitable for this purpose, as there is low correlation between the codes. If all of the users are received with the same power level, then the variance (e.g., the noise power) of the MAI increases in direct proportion to the number of users. In other words, unlike synchronous CDMA, the signals of other users will appear as noise to the signal of interest and interfere slightly with the desired signal in proportion to number of users. All forms of CDMA use the
spread-spectrum In telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire A wire is a single usually cylindrical A cylinder (from Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or ...
spreading factor to allow receivers to partially discriminate against unwanted signals. Signals encoded with the specified spreading sequences are received, while signals with different sequences (or the same sequences but different timing offsets) appear as wideband noise reduced by the spreading factor. Since each user generates MAI, controlling the signal strength is an important issue with CDMA transmitters. A CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, or FDMA receiver can in theory completely reject arbitrarily strong signals using different codes, time slots or frequency channels due to the orthogonality of these systems. This is not true for asynchronous CDMA; rejection of unwanted signals is only partial. If any or all of the unwanted signals are much stronger than the desired signal, they will overwhelm it. This leads to a general requirement in any asynchronous CDMA system to approximately match the various signal power levels as seen at the receiver. In CDMA cellular, the base station uses a fast closed-loop power-control scheme to tightly control each mobile's transmit power. In 2019, schemes to precisely estimate the required length of the codes in dependence of Doppler and delay characteristics have been developed. Soon after, machine learning based techniques that generate sequences of a desired length and spreading properties have been published as well. These are highly competitive with the classic Gold and Welch sequences. These are not generated by linear-feedback-shift-registers, but have to be stored in lookup tables.

## Advantages of asynchronous CDMA over other techniques

### Efficient practical utilization of the fixed frequency spectrum

In theory CDMA, TDMA and FDMA have exactly the same spectral efficiency, but, in practice, each has its own challenges â€“ power control in the case of CDMA, timing in the case of TDMA, and frequency generation/filtering in the case of FDMA. TDMA systems must carefully synchronize the transmission times of all the users to ensure that they are received in the correct time slot and do not cause interference. Since this cannot be perfectly controlled in a mobile environment, each time slot must have a guard time, which reduces the probability that users will interfere, but decreases the spectral efficiency. Similarly, FDMA systems must use a guard band between adjacent channels, due to the unpredictable
Doppler shift The Doppler effect or Doppler shift (or simply Doppler, when in context) is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer (physics), observer who is moving relative to the wave source. It is named after the Austrian physicist ...

of the signal spectrum because of user mobility. The guard bands will reduce the probability that adjacent channels will interfere, but decrease the utilization of the spectrum.

### Flexible allocation of resources

Asynchronous CDMA offers a key advantage in the flexible allocation of resources i.e. allocation of spreading sequences to active users. In the case of CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA the number of simultaneous orthogonal codes, time slots, and frequency slots respectively are fixed, hence the capacity in terms of the number of simultaneous users is limited. There are a fixed number of orthogonal codes, time slots or frequency bands that can be allocated for CDM, TDMA, and FDMA systems, which remain underutilized due to the bursty nature of telephony and packetized data transmissions. There is no strict limit to the number of users that can be supported in an asynchronous CDMA system, only a practical limit governed by the desired bit error probability since the SIR (signal-to-interference ratio) varies inversely with the number of users. In a bursty traffic environment like mobile telephony, the advantage afforded by asynchronous CDMA is that the performance (bit error rate) is allowed to fluctuate randomly, with an average value determined by the number of users times the percentage of utilization. Suppose there are 2''N'' users that only talk half of the time, then 2''N'' users can be accommodated with the same ''average'' bit error probability as ''N'' users that talk all of the time. The key difference here is that the bit error probability for ''N'' users talking all of the time is constant, whereas it is a ''random'' quantity (with the same mean) for 2''N'' users talking half of the time. In other words, asynchronous CDMA is ideally suited to a mobile network where large numbers of transmitters each generate a relatively small amount of traffic at irregular intervals. CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA systems cannot recover the underutilized resources inherent to bursty traffic due to the fixed number of
orthogonal In mathematics, orthogonality is the generalization of the notion of perpendicularity to the linear algebra of bilinear forms. Two elements ''u'' and ''v'' of a vector space with bilinear form ''B'' are orthogonal when . Depending on the bili ...
codes, time slots or frequency channels that can be assigned to individual transmitters. For instance, if there are ''N'' time slots in a TDMA system and 2''N'' users that talk half of the time, then half of the time there will be more than ''N'' users needing to use more than ''N'' time slots. Furthermore, it would require significant overhead to continually allocate and deallocate the orthogonal-code, time-slot or frequency-channel resources. By comparison, asynchronous CDMA transmitters simply send when they have something to say and go off the air when they do not, keeping the same signature sequence as long as they are connected to the system.

rake receiver A rake receiver is a radio receiver designed to counter the effects of multipath fading. It does this by using several "sub-receivers" called ''fingers'', that is, several correlators each assigned to a different multipath component. Each finger ...
, which exploits multipath delay components to improve the performance of the system. A rake receiver combines the information from several correlators, each one tuned to a different path delay, producing a stronger version of the signal than a simple receiver with a single correlation tuned to the path delay of the strongest signal. Frequency reuse is the ability to reuse the same radio channel frequency at other cell sites within a cellular system. In the FDMA and TDMA systems, frequency planning is an important consideration. The frequencies used in different cells must be planned carefully to ensure signals from different cells do not interfere with each other. In a CDMA system, the same frequency can be used in every cell, because channelization is done using the pseudo-random codes. Reusing the same frequency in every cell eliminates the need for frequency planning in a CDMA system; however, planning of the different pseudo-random sequences must be done to ensure that the received signal from one cell does not correlate with the signal from a nearby cell. Since adjacent cells use the same frequencies, CDMA systems have the ability to perform soft hand-offs. Soft hand-offs allow the mobile telephone to communicate simultaneously with two or more cells. The best signal quality is selected until the hand-off is complete. This is different from hard hand-offs utilized in other cellular systems. In a hard-hand-off situation, as the mobile telephone approaches a hand-off, signal strength may vary abruptly. In contrast, CDMA systems use the soft hand-off, which is undetectable and provides a more reliable and higher-quality signal.

# Collaborative CDMA

A novel collaborative multi-user transmission and detection scheme called collaborative CDMA has been investigated for the uplink that exploits the differences between users' fading channel signatures to increase the user capacity well beyond the spreading length in the MAI-limited environment. The authors show that it is possible to achieve this increase at a low complexity and high
bit error rate In digital transmission, the number of bit errors is the number of received bits of a data stream over a communication channel that have been altered due to noise (telecommunications), noise, interference (communication), interference, distortion o ...
performance in flat fading channels, which is a major research challenge for overloaded CDMA systems. In this approach, instead of using one sequence per user as in conventional CDMA, the authors group a small number of users to share the same spreading sequence and enable group spreading and despreading operations. The new collaborative multi-user receiver consists of two stages: group multi-user detection (MUD) stage to suppress the MAI between the groups and a low-complexity maximum-likelihood detection stage to recover jointly the co-spread users' data using minimal Euclidean-distance measure and users' channel-gain coefficients. An enhanced CDMA version known as interleave-division multiple access (IDMA) uses the orthogonal interleaving as the only means of user separation in place of signature sequence used in CDMA system.

*
CDMA spectral efficiency CDMA spectral efficiency refers to the system spectral efficiency in bit/s/Hz/site or Erlang/MHz/site that can be achieved in a certain CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method In telecommunications and computer ne ...
*
CDMA2000 CDMA2000 (also known as C2K or IMT Multiâ€‘Carrier (IMTâ€‘MC)) is a family of 3G mobile technology standards for sending voice, data, and signaling In signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focu ...
*
Comparison of mobile phone standards This is a comparison of standards of mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, or hand phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell or just phone, is a portable telephone A telephone is a ...
*
cdmaOne Interim Standard 95 (IS-95) was the first ever CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two termi ...
* Orthogonal variable spreading factor (OVSF), an implementation of CDMA *
Pseudo-random noise In cryptography, pseudorandom noise (PRN ) is a Signalling (telecommunication), signal similar to noise (physics), noise which satisfies one or more of the standard tests for statistical randomness. Although it seems to lack any definite pattern, ...
* Quadrature-division multiple access (QDMA), an implementation of CDMA * Rise over thermal *
Spread spectrum In telecommunication and radio communication, spread-spectrum techniques are methods by which a signal (electrical engineering), signal (e.g., an electrical, electromagnetic, or acoustic signal) generated with a particular Bandwidth (signal pr ...
*
W-CDMA The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is a European standard for mobile devices. GSM may also refer to: Edu ...