BER-Optimized Linear Parallel Interference Cancellers for Multicarrier DS-CDMA Systems

Abstract — In this paper, we consider the design and bit error performance analysis of linear parallel interference cancellers (LPIC) for multicarrier (MC) DS-CDMA systems. We propose an LPIC scheme where we estimate (and cancel) the multiple access interference (MAI) based on the soft decision outputs on individual subcarriers, and the interference cancelled outputs on different subcarriers are combined to form the final decision statistic. We scale the MAI estimate on individual subcarriers by a weight before cancellation. In order to choose these weights optimally, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) at the output of different stages of the LPIC, which we minimize to obtain the optimum weights for the different stages. We show that the proposed BER-optimized weighted LPIC scheme performs better than the MF detector and the conventional LPIC scheme (where the weights are taken to be unity), and close to the decorrelating detector. Keywords – Linear PIC, multicarrier DS-CDMA, optimum weights I