Group detection for synchronous Gaussian code-division multiple-access channels

The concept of group detection is introduced to address the design of suboptimum multiuser detectors for CodeDivision Multiple-Access (CDMA) channels. A group detection scheme consists of a bank of P group detectors, one each for detecting the information symbols of users in each group of a P group partition of the li simultaneously transmitting users. In a parallel group detection scheme, these group detectors operate independently, whereas in a sequential scheme, each group detector uses the decisions of the previous group detectors to successively cancel the interference from those users. Group detectors based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) are obtained for the synchronous Gaussian CDMA channel. The complexity of these detectors is exponential in the group size, whereas that of the optimum detector is exponential in I<:. Since the partition of users is a design parameter, group sizes can be chosen to satisfy a wide range of complexity constraints. A key performance result is that the GLRT group detectors are optimally group near-far resistant. Furthermore, upper and lower bounds on the asymptotic efficiency of the sequential group detectors are derived. These bounds reveal that the sequential group detectors can, under certain conditions, perform as well as GLRT group detectors of much larger group sizes. Group detection provides a unifying approach to multiuser detection. When the users are partitioned into I< single-user groups, the GLRT, a modified form of GLRT, and the sequential group detectors reduce to previously proposed suboptimal detectors; namely, the decorrelator, the two-stage detector, and the decorrelating decision-feedback detector, respectively. For the other nontrivial partitions, the group detectors are new and have a performance that is commensurate with their complexity.