In this paper, the design of decision-feedback multiuser (DFM) receivers for asynchronous code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems over a mismatched flat Rayleigh fading channel is studied, and tight upper and lower bounds on the pair-wise symbol-error probability, which has been averaged over the channel fading, time delays, and phase angles, are derived for some of the DFM detection schemes. The performance bounds, which are computed by efficient analytic techniques, can serve as reliable references for CDMA system design. It is shown that the proposed system, which takes into account the effect of mismatched fading on the system design, has some gain over the system where the estimation of fading is assumed to be exact.

An expression in matrix form for the multiple-access interference (MAI) in an asynchronous direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS/SSMA) communication system with cascaded sequences (CVs), arbitrary chip waveforms, and trellis-coded modulation (TCM) with a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal set is obtained. TCM provides significant coding gain while the CVs decrease the correlation between the MAI of adjacent data intervals. The expression is used to calculate arbitrarily accurate probability density functions (PDFs) of the MAI in the TCM system and to derive an accurate approximation of the MAI variance. It also helps illustrate some properties of the MAI by separating contributing parameters into different matrices. We derive an approximation of the upper union bound on the bit-error probability and investigate its applicability. The results show that CV schemes can greatly reduce the pairwise error probabilities (PEPs) until the length of the CV becomes greater than that of the error weight sequence (EWS) under consideration.

Arbitrarily tight upper and lower bounds on the pairwise error probability (PEP) of a trellis-coded or convolutional-coded direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS/SSMA) communication system over a Rayleigh fading channel are derived. A new set of probability density functions (PDFs) and cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of the multiple-access interference (MAI) statistic is derived, and a modified bounding technique is proposed to obtain the bounds. The upper bounds and lower bounds together specify the accuracy of the resulting estimation of the PEP, and give an indication of the system error performance. Several suboptimum decoding schemes are proposed and their performances are compared to that of the optimum decoding scheme by the average pairwise error probability (APEP) values. The approach can be used to accurately study the multiple-access capability of the coded DS/SSMA system without numerical integrations.