Effect of Orthogonal Spreading on the Performance of Multipath Faded Multi-Code CDMA Systems

This paper is concerned with the reverse link performance of multi-code CDMA systems in multipath fading environments. The degree of orthogonality loss among multiple spreading code channels is characterized as the orthogonality factor. It depends on various system parameters including multipath power profiles of propagation channels and the number of Paths resolved at a Rake receiver. The effect of the parameters on the system performance is then investigated in terms of bit error rate and required signal quality. The results show that multipath delay power profiles dominantly affect mutual interference among multi-code channels and multipath combining gain by bandwidth expansion is not so great due to the increase of the mutual interference. Moreover, the orthogonality factor is derived as the value of between (1/m) and 1.