The characteristics of the spreading sequence significantly affect the signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) of the received signal in direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) system. In this paper, we analyze the receiver performance of the forward link of a DS-CDMA system in terms of the SIR and bit error rate (BER) when pseudo noise (PN) codes and concatenated orthogonal/PN (OPN) codes are used as the spreading sequence. The use of OPN spreading codes can cancel out the intra-cell interference signals with equal path delay, but the use of PN spreading codes cannot, significantly degrading the performance. As a result, the BER performance of the OPN spreading system is better than that of the PN spreading system. The use of OPN spreading sequences can provide the system capacity at least two times larger than the use of PN spreading sequences in the single-cell environment even when the channel has a large number of multipaths. The two spreading systems also show significant difference in the user capacity even in a multi-cell environment.

This paper presents a generation method of orthogonal spreading codes with different spreading factors (SFs), which are called orthogonal multi-SF spreading codes in this paper, for DS-CDMA mobile radio. The generated orthogonal multi-SF spreading codes have a tree structure and the codes are applied to the forward link such that all users, who transmit data at different rates, are orthogonalized. A group spreading modulator that simplifies the base station transmitter structure is also described. The transmission performance of the orthogonal multi-SF forward link under multi-user and frequency selective Rayleigh fading environments is evaluated by computer simulation to show that its performance is identical to that achieved by using multiple orthogonal spreading codes in parallel (orthogonal multicode forward link). Unlike the orthogonal multicode forward link, only a single Rake combiner is required at a mobile receiver which significantly simplifies the mobile receiver structure.

The transmission performance of DS-CDMA forward link with orthogonal spreading and Rake combining is evaluated under multipath fading environments. A simple-to-use expression for the conditional instantaneous signal-to-interference plus background noise power ratio (SIR) is derived, assuming an M-finger Rake combiner. Using the derived expression, the forward link SIRs of either orthogonal spreading or random spreading can be conveniently computed. The link performance in terms of the average bit error rate (BER) and capacity (the maximum number of allowable users) is evaluated by a Monte Carlo simulation assuming ideal BPSK data modulation. In frequency selective multipath fading, the orthogonality of the forward link is destroyed to some extent and link performance approaches that of random spreading. The extent of orthogonality destruction depends on the multipath channel power delay profile shape and number of resolved paths (for an exponential profile, it is defined as the number of stronger resolved paths that capture 90% of the total received power); so their influences on the link performance are discussed. Also simulated is the distribution of the BERs in a radio coverage area taking into account the path loss and shadowing to evaluate the link capacity at a certain outage probability.