Comparison of pilot symbol-assisted and differentially detected BPSK for DS-CDMA systems employing RAKE receivers in Rayleigh fading channels

The capacity of a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system is a function of the bit error rate (BER) performance of individual users. Therefore, it is important to optimize the individual links before proceeding to system level analysis. This is particularly true for operating in a fading channel where the performance without diversity reception is rather poor. This paper compares the BER performance of differential detection and pilot symbol-assisted coherent detection of a direct-sequence (DS) spread-spectrum (SS) signal on a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel using RAKE reception. Both equal gain and maximal ratio combining are considered, and the effect of convolutional coding with interleaving is studied. It is shown that in the particular cases considered in this paper, rate 1/8 convolutionally encoded pilot symbol-assisted BPSK performs better than coded differential detection, thus providing a higher system capacity.