CDMA Overview

ACCESS SCHEMES Home News Industry Technology Applications 3G Devices Events Articles FAQ Resources 3G Jobs History Links Downloads Last Words Contact Us For radio systems there are two resources, frequency and time. Division by frequency, so that each pair of communicators is allocated part of the spectrum for all of the time, results in Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). Division by time, so that each pair of communicators is allocated all (or at least a large part) of the spectrum for part of the time results in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). In Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), every communicator will be allocated the entire spectrum all of the time. CDMA uses codes to identify connections.

Multiple Access Schemes

CODING CDMA uses unique spreading codes to spread the baseband data before transmission. The signal is transmitted in a channel, which is below noise level. The receiver then uses a correlator to despread the wanted signal, which is passed through a narrow bandpass filter. Unwanted signals will not be despread and will not pass through the filter. Codes take the form of a carefully designed one/zero sequence produced at a much higher rate than that of the baseband data. The rate of a spreading code is referred to as chip rate rather than bit rate. See coding process page for more details.

CDMA spreading

CODES CDMA codes are not required to provide call security, but create a uniqueness to enable call identification. Codes should not correlate to other codes or time shifted version of itself. Spreading codes are noise like pseudo-random codes, channel codes are designed for maximum separation from each other and cell identification codes are balanced not to correlate to other codes of itself. See codes page for more details.

Example OVSF codes, used in channel coding

THE SPREADING PROCESS WCDMA uses Direct Sequence spreading, where spreading process is done by directly combining the baseband information to high chip rate binary code. The Spreading Factor is the ratio of the chips (UMTS = 3.84Mchips/s) to baseband information rate. Spreading factors vary from 4 to 512 in FDD UMTS. Spreading process gain can in expressed in dBs (Spreading factor 128 = 21dB gain). See spreading page for more details.

CDMA spreading

POWER CONTROL CDMA is interference limited multiple access system. Because all users transmit on the same

frequency, internal interference generated by the system is the most significant factor in determining system capacity and call quality. The transmit power for each user must be reduced to limit interference, however, the power should be enough to maintain the required Eb/No (signal to noise ratio) for a satisfactory call quality. Maximum capacity is achieved when Eb/No of every user is at the minimum level needed for the acceptable channel performance. As the MS moves around, the RF environment continuously changes due to fast and slow fading, external interference, shadowing , and other factors. The aim of the dynamic power control is to limit transmitted power on both the links while maintaining link quality under all conditions. Additional advantages are longer mobile battery life and longer life span of BTS power amplifiers See UMTS power control page for more details.

HANDOVER Handover occurs when a call has to be passed from one cell to another as the user moves between cells. In a traditional "hard" handover, the connection to the current cell is broken, and then the connection to the new cell is made. This is known as a "break-before-make" handover. Since all cells in CDMA use the same frequency, it is possible to make the connection to the new cell before leaving the current cell. This is known as a "make-before-break" or "soft" handover. Soft handovers require less power, which reduces interference and increases capacity. Mobile can be connected to more that two BTS the handover. "Softer" handover is a special case of soft handover where the radio links that are added and removed belong to the same Node B. See Handover page for more details.

CDMA soft handover MULTIPATH AND RAKE RECEIVERS

One of the main advantages of CDMA systems is the capability of using signals that arrive in the receivers with different time delays. This phenomenon is called multipath. FDMA and TDMA, which are narrow band systems, cannot discriminate between the multipath arrivals, and resort to equalization to mitigate the negative effects of multipath. Due to its wide bandwidth and rake receivers, CDMA uses the multipath signals and combines them to make an even stronger signal at the receivers. CDMA subscriber units use rake receivers. This is essentially a set of several receivers. One of the receivers (fingers) constantly searches for different multipaths and feeds the information to the other three fingers. Each finger then demodulates the signal corresponding to a strong multipath. The results are then combined together to make the signal stronger.
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UMTS Overview CDMA Overview

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ETSI HIPERLAN Type 1 MAC Protocol

HIgh PErformance Radio Local Area Network or HIPERLAN was developed well before the IEEE developed 802.11. HIPERLAN is a family of standards. One standard cannot satisfy all requirements and we now see IEEE 802.11 developing slowly into a family. The Hiperlan family varies the:

Range, Bandwidth, QoS support Commercial constraints

HIPERLAN 1 has bee standardized since 1996. It was an initiative organized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Hiperlan is a family of standards for:

Wireless LAN Wireless ATM - designed to provide asynchronous transfers of data as well as multi-media. (ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode) HIPERACCESS - High Performance Access Networks Technology HIPERLINK - A standard to provide very high speed short link data transfer.

The names keep changing. There are also Hiperlan 2, 3 and 4 standards:

If you have time have a quick browse of the ETSI Radio portal where a wide variety of standards for all sorts of wireless systems are described. Back to Hiperlan I! HIPERLAN 1 was designed to be like a wireless version of Ethernet, the industry standard wired LAN. The control mechanism is designed for wireless and is distributed, not dependent on infrastructure. Access Points have no greater rights to priority than others. The Channel Access Control (CAC) protocol is more sophisticated than IEEE 802.11's. It has station priority determined by the type of traffic (data, multi-media) and packet lifetime using an Earliest Deadline First (EDF) method. This means that at choice points instead of making a random choice as with IEEE 802.11 with a slight bias to the longest waiting packet, the choice is determined by a life time associated with all packets. The packet with the shortest lifetime will be sent next. However, the system is fair to traffic that is already on air being non-preemptive, lower priority traffic is not bumped off by higher priority traffic such as voice or video.

Hiperlan I's medium access control is quite elaborate. It is called EY-NPMA (Elimination Yield Non-preemptive Priority Multiple Access). There are 3 phases: 1. Priority Resolution. As stated above, every packet has a priority which depends on its type (besteffort, multi-media) and on its remaining life-time. There are five levels of channel access priority (0 - 4). There are two levels of user priority (0 - 1) for time-bounded and best-efforts traffic. Channel access priority depends on user priority and residual lifetime. Initial lifetime can be up to 16,000 ms, the default is 500 ms. Priority-n must wait n priority slot intervals (~ n X 10 ms).
Residual Lifetime User Priority 0 User Priority 1 < 10ms 10 - 20ms 20 - 40ms 40 - 80ms > 80ms 0 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 4

Every priority corresponds to a target time-slot to send in the first phase, the higher the priority the earlier the target time-slot to send. Higher priorities can not be preempted, so low priority traffic always finishes before someone else can grab the channel. If a scheduled earlier time-slot for a higher priority packet

remains empty, stations with the next lower priority might send. The role of this first phase is to find the packet/station pair with the highest priority. This is done by stations listening to the medium for P slots (the priority). If the medium remains idle and the station has a packet with a matching priority to the slot it sends a burst of bits. Stations sensing this burst of bits now know that there is a station with higher priority than them and they must stay silent. Stations with the same priority may or may not have heard the medium busy. If they did not hear the medium busy then they will enter the next phase. 2. Contention Resolution. Now assuming several terminals (can) now have the same priority and wish to send, they each send an Elimination Burst: all remaining terminals send a burst to eliminate contenders (11111010100010011100000110010110, high bitrate). These last for a random number of 10 ms slots. They then listen during the Elimination Survival Verification: contenders now sense the channel, if the channel is free they can continue, otherwise they have been eliminated. The bursts vary in length randomly in slot units which means that usually most stations will be eliminated but it is still possible to have more than one station still contending at the end of this phase. Stage 2 ends with Yield Listening: contenders again listen (do not transmit) in slots (5ms) randomly with a nonzero probability (0.1), if the terminal senses its slot (the slots are numbered 0 to 9 so 90% of remaining contenders should be eliminated) idle it is free to transmit at the end of the contention phase. Nodes that have chosen the shortest yield listening period then survive the yield phase. 3. Transmission. The winner can now send its data (however, a small chance of collision remains). If the channel was idle for a longer time (min. for a duration of 1700 bit) a terminal can send at once without using EY-NPMA The random number generators were chosen to reduce the collision rate to 3.5% for 256 simultaneous attempts (fully connected). This means that in practice the probability of a data collision is small. Clearly all the stations must be roughly synchronized for this scheme to work. Synchronization is achieved by sensing the end of the previous data. This means that small variations will occur but the variations are limited by the range of the signals to be very small. Because the system re-synchronizes after every data send, clock drift is never a major issue.

This scheme is explained (better) in the book on pages 240 to 243.