Multi-user detection for DS-CDMA communications

Direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) is a popular wireless technology. In DS-CDMA communications, all of the users' signals overlap in time and frequency and cause mutual interference. The conventional DS-CDMA detector follows a single-user detection strategy in which each user is detected separately without regard for the other users. A better strategy is multi-user detection, where information about multiple users is used to improve detection of each individual user. This article describes a number of important multiuser DS-CDMA detectors that have been proposed.