An investigation into the improvement in WCDMA system performance using multiuser detection and interference cancellation

Abstract

WCDMA is typically characterised as a system capable of providing mobile users with data rates up to 2 Mb/s and beyond. It has been termed an ultra high-speed, ultra high-capacity radio technology that will be able to carry a new range of fast, colourful media, such as colour graphics, video, animations, digital audio, Internet and e-mail that consumers will be able to access over their mobiles devices. This current study has researched on the various existing Multiuser detection (MUD) processes or proposals conducted by various research institutions around the world. It has identified the advantages that the past work offers, and it is these advantages that form the basis of the current research into the improvement techniques. The proposed Partial Parallel Pipelined Multiuser Detector (PPPMUD or P3MUD) has come about from two main flavours or directions of research. The first one seeks to promote the Soft Parallel Interference Cancellation technique as an effective bias mitigation technique. This bias occurring in the second stage decision statistics, exhibits a very harmful effect on system Bit Error Rate, (BER), particularly for large system loads. This current study goes further by carefully analysing the Soft Cancellation Factor, SCF behaviour to eventually derive and determine the optimum SCF value which exhibits positive characteristics when varied with the increasing system load (number of users). This optimum SCF value is called the universal SCF or SCFUNV, as it is theoretically supposed to perform favourably under various system loads. A favourable or acceptable performance would be characterised by low observed or measured BER during the system processing stages. A further enhancement to the operational performance of the SCFUNV algorithm is the SCFUNV Compensator, which is basically a compensation mechanism created by modelling the behaviour of the SCF values, and adjusts the SCFUNV depending on the system load, (number of simultaneous users). Thus, the SCFUNV is adaptively adjusted in order to perform acceptably under all load conditions. The second direction of research, as regards improvements in MUD techniques, involves the conventional Bit-Streaming, Pipelined Multiuser Detector. This came about due to the computational complexity as well as matrix inversions which affected earlier asynchronous multiuser detection techniques. This detector has a pipelined architecture which avoids multishot (block-based) detection and instead, processes the bits in a streaming fashion. The architecture consists of a matched filter followed by three stages of parallel interference cancellation, (PIC). This present study extends that research by outlining the advantages of incorporating the soft parallel interference cancellation technique, by way of the universal soft cancellation factor, (SCFUNV), into the conventional pipelined multiuser detector architecture to form the P3MUD architecture, which includes the compensator. The contributions of the proposed P3MUD system is that the observed BER output simulations are promising, with an observed overall decrease in the error rate for the P3MUD process, as compared to the conventional pipelined detection method. This decrease signifies an improvement offered by the proposed (P3MUD) algorithm. Further observed analysis indicates the possibility of decreasing the number of parallel interference cancellation stages from three to at least two, after the matched filter detection stage, without an observable change in system BER. Hence, the proposal of the two-stage P3MUD.