Code-division multiple access: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:05, 25 May 2025

Revision as of 05:38, 11 June 2025

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It can be also used as a channel or medium access technology, like [[ALOHA]] for example or as a permanent pilot/signalling channel to allow users to synchronize their local oscillators to a common system frequency, thereby also estimating the channel parameters permanently.

In these schemes, the message is modulated on a longer spreading sequence, consisting of several chips (0es0s and 1es1s). Due to their very advantageous auto- and crosscorrelation characteristics, these spreading sequences have also been used for radar applications for many decades, where they are called [[Barker code]]s (with a very short sequence length of typically 8 to 32).

For space-based communication applications, CDMA has been used for many decades due to the large path loss and Doppler shift caused by satellite motion. CDMA is often used with [[binary phase-shift keying]] (BPSK) in its simplest form, but can be combined with any modulation scheme like (in advanced cases) [[quadrature amplitude modulation]] (QAM) or [[orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing]] (OFDM), which typically makes it very robust and efficient (and equipping them with accurate ranging capabilities, which is difficult without CDMA). Other schemes use subcarriers based on [[binary offset carrier modulation]] (BOC modulation), which is inspired by [[Manchester code]]s and enable a larger gap between the virtual center frequency and the subcarriers, which is not the case for OFDM subcarriers.