Achieving Single-User Performance in an FEC-Coded DS-CDMA System for Frequency Selective and Flat Fading Channels

This paper presents a reduced-complexity soft-input soft-output trellis/tree multiuser equalizer for an iterative DS-CDMA system undergoing Rayleigh frequency selective fading. The algorithm first expands the equalizer-trellis to an equivalent trellis/tree structure. Then it applies the M-algorithm to the equivalent structure twice, once to reduce the number of states in the trellis and the other to reduce the number of branches emanating from each state. To compute soft-information, the algorithm utilizes not only those fully-extended paths reaching the end of the trellis but also paths that are traversed and discarded in the pruned trellis. Through a simple update-and-discard procedure, reliable soft-information is extracted from discarded paths which enables an extremely large trellis to be successfully decoded with modest complexity. BER performance is presented for a convolutional-coded DS-CDMA system employing random spreading sequences. Our results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of achieving single-user performance with a much reduced complexity. The proposed algorithm can also be applied to reduce the complexity of multiuser detection where the transmission channel is frequency flat. Single-user performance can also be achieved with the proposed technique.