Concatenated coded spreading with coherent demodulation for DS-CDMA

In DS-CDMA systems, spreading may be viewed as inner coding and user-specific scrambling. In practice, spreading is combined with an outer convolutional code, which leads to so-called concatenated coded spreading (CCS). The standard approach is to use repetition codes. In the IS-95 uplink, a (64,6,32) orthogonal code is defined, which can be interpreted as 64-ary orthogonal modulation. In this paper, a CCS scheme with power efficiency superior to the IS-95 uplink is proposed. The use of decision-directed coherent demodulation for both schemes is discussed, and it will be shown that the coding gain of the improved CCS requires a modified channel estimation scheme.