CDMA forward link capacity and coverage in a multipath fading channel

This paper presents an analysis of the CDMA forward link capacity and coverage in a multipath fading channel for slow moving users. Previous analysis of CDMA capacity ignored several factors that affect the forward link performance [1]. The analysis presented in this paper takes into account short term fading, lognormal shadowing, frame error rate (FER) requirement, outage, power allocation, soft handoff, the number of multipaths and the number of required Rake fingers. Finally, both Rayleigh and Rician fading are considered.