In order to judge the goodness of zero correlation zone sequence sets, a new concept, called ZCZ characteristic, is proposed. Then by defining a sequence operation, i.e. correlation product, and establishing its basic properties, a new approach to construct sets of sequences with a large zero correlation zone is presented.

In this paper, a quasi-synchronous code-division multiple-access (QS-CDMA) is investigated for application in the reverse link of a microcellular or indoor mobile communication environment. In a QS-CDMA system, the relative time delay between the signals of different users is normally restricted within a few chips. Generalized orthogonal (GO) codes added with guard chips are employed as the spreading sequences in this paper and the strict timing error restrictions for BPSK and M-QAM modulation schemes are derived based on the correlation properties of GO code set which determines the multiple access interference (MAI). The results reveal that the system employing GO code set with bigger GO zone can tolerate more serious timing error, and higher order modulation schemes require stricter synchronization. Based on the system model presented, the BER performance for BPSK and M-QAM is evaluated by Gaussian Approximation (GA) and Monte Carlo simulation. The system capacity in terms of acquirable total bit rates are also evaluated, revealing that if system synchronization error is limited within the GO zone, M-QAM scheme can be utilized to improve the system capacity.