CDMA (code division multiple access)

Introduction
 Employs spread-spectrum technology and a special coding scheme (where each
transmitter is assigned a code).
 Users are allocated with all bandwidth at any time
 User identifications by unique signature waveform

Classification
 Single carrier CDMA
Transmit signal over a single frequency band

 Multi carrier CDMA

Transmit signal over multiple frequency bands
Narrowband, independent fading

Methodology
CDMA exploits mathematical properties of orthogonality between vectors . If the dot
product is zero, the two vectors are said to be orthogonal to each other.

Message Signal

Pseudo Random Noise Sequence

Encoded Output

Example
Encoding

Decoding
Applications
 Digital cellular applications based on CDMA were developed with the
collaboration of several carrier and equipment manufacturers, such as Motorola,
P.C.S., and NOKIA.
 Among the services available to CDMA users are:
web browsing, m-commerce (paying bills, purchasing), MMS (multimedia messaging
services), entertainment (streaming video, games) and enterprise solutions (email, file
download, video conferencing).
 CDMA was first used in the military, during World War 2.
Since the transmission is over a wide bandwidth of frequencies, the enemy can’t
identify the signal easily.
 Global Positioning System (GPS).

Advantages
 Flexible network planning (planning is no longer needed)
 Better spectrum utilization as Guard band is not required.
 Immune to jamming.
 Capacity can be increased by compromising a bit on quality.
 cost(larger profit for providers due to increased capacity, less infrastructure)
 Customer satisfaction (privacy, better call quality, prevent cross talks)
 resistant to multipath fading.

Disadvantages
 Synchronization
Difficult to satisfy synchronization requirements.

 Self jamming
Self jamming is a steep deterioration of performance as a result of poor
synchronization. Poor synchronization causes partial-correlation with the codes of
other users and the result will be a vast increase of the interference.

 Near-far problem
Power control is necessary for mitigating the Near-far problem.
  Throughput
Low throughput efficiency for large number of users.

References
 Communication Systems-Simon Haykin
 Signals and systems- B.P. Lathi