Adaptive DS/CDMA packet radio communications over indoor multipath fading channels

In this paper, we propose an adaptive data transmission scheme for DS/CDMA packet radio communication systems in bandlimited indoor multipath fading channels. We first analyze the relationship between the code rate and the processing gain (defined as the number of chips per coded bit) in maximizing the normalized throughput in connection with the channel state of the indoor multipath fading channels. One observation made is that the maximum throughput with BPSK modulation is attained when the code rate is chosen as low as possible irrespective of the channel state, and the processing gain is increased (decreased) as the channel becomes worse (better). The other observation made is that when DPSK modulation is employed, there exists an optimal combination of the code rate and the processing gain in maximizing the normalized throughput for each channel state. Based on these observations, we propose to adapt the processing gain and/or code rate according to the fading conditions in order to maximize the normalized throughput. We analyze the performance of the proposed scheme and compare it with the non-adaptive data transmission scheme. Our results show that the adaptive transmission scheme yields a significant performance improvement over the nonadaptive scheme, and increasing the adaptation level is more effective as the channel gets worse, but the 3-state adaptation seems to be practically optimum.