Code-division multiple access 

(CDMA) is a channel access method used by

various radio communication technologies. CDMA is an example of multiple access,
where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single
communication channel. This allows several users to share a band of frequencies
(see bandwidth). To permit this without undue interference between the users, CDMA
employs spread spectrum technology and a special coding scheme (where each
transmitter is assigned a code).[1][2]
CDMA optimizes the use of available bandwidth as it transmits over the entire frequency
range and does not limit the user's frequency range.
It is used as the access method in many mobile phone standards. IS-95, also called
"cdmaOne", and its 3G evolution CDMA2000, are often simply referred to as "CDMA",
but UMTS, the 3G standard used by GSM carriers, also uses "wideband CDMA", or W-
CDMA, as well as TD-CDMA and TD-SCDMA, as its radio technologies.
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 (0es and 1es). 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 codes (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. Due to these
effects, in those applications neither FDMA nor TDMA is typically used as a single
modulation. CDMA is often used with BPSK in its simplest form, but can be combined
with any modulation scheme like (in advanced cases) QAM or 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 (BOC), which is inspired by Manchester codes and enable a larger
gap between the virtual center frequency and the subcarriers, which is not the case for
OFDM subcarriers. Many carriers (such as AT&T and Verizon) will shut down 3G CDMA
networks in 2022.

In the Soviet Union (USSR), the first work devoted to this subject was published in
1935 by Dmitry Ageev.[6] It was shown that through the use of linear methods, there
are three types of signal separation: frequency, time and compensatory.[clarification
needed]
 The technology of CDMA was used in 1957, when the young military radio
engineer Leonid Kupriyanovich in Moscow made an experimental model of a wearable
automatic mobile phone, called LK-1 by him, with a base station.[7] LK-1 has a weight of
3 kg, 20–30 km operating distance, and 20–30 hours of battery life.[8][9] The base
station, as described by the author, could serve several customers. In 1958,
Kupriyanovich made the new experimental "pocket" model of mobile phone. This phone
weighed 0.5 kg. To serve more customers, Kupriyanovich proposed the device, which
he called "correlator."[10][11] In 1958, the USSR also started the development of the
"Altai" national civil mobile phone service for cars, based on the Soviet MRT-1327
standard. The phone system weighed 11 kg (24 lb). It was placed in the trunk of the
vehicles of high-ranking officials and used a standard handset in the passenger
compartment. The main developers of the Altai system were VNIIS (Voronezh Science
Research Institute of Communications) and GSPI (State Specialized Project Institute). In
1963 this service started in Moscow, and in 1970 Altai service was used in 30 USSR
cities.[
CDMA is a spread-spectrum multiple-access technique. A spread-spectrum technique
spreads the bandwidth of the data uniformly for the same transmitted power. A
spreading code is a pseudo-random code that has a narrow ambiguity function, unlike
other narrow pulse codes. In CDMA a locally generated code runs at a much higher rate
than the data to be transmitted. Data for transmission is combined by
bitwise XOR (exclusive OR) with the faster code. The figure shows how a spread-
spectrum signal is generated. The data signal with pulse duration of  (symbol period) is
XORed with the code signal with pulse duration of  (chip period). (Note: bandwidth is
proportional to , where  = bit time.) Therefore, the bandwidth of the data signal is  and
the bandwidth of the spread spectrum signal is . Since  is much smaller than , the
bandwidth of the spread-spectrum signal is much larger than the bandwidth of the
original signal. The ratio  is called the spreading factor or processing gain and
determines to a certain extent the upper limit of the total number of users supported
simultaneously by a base station.[1

Each user in a CDMA system uses a different code to modulate their signal. Choosing
the codes used to modulate the signal is very important in the performance of CDMA
systems. The best performance occurs when there is good separation between the
signal of a desired user and the signals of other users. The separation of the signals is
made by correlating the received signal with the locally generated code of the desired
user. If the signal matches the desired user's code, then the correlation function will be
high and the system can extract that signal. If the desired user's code has nothing in
common with the signal, the correlation should be as close to zero as possible (thus
eliminating the signal); this is referred to as cross-correlation. If the code is correlated
with the signal at any time offset other than zero, the correlation should be as close to
zero as possible. This is referred to as auto-correlation and is used to reject multi-path
interference.[17][18]
An analogy to the problem of multiple access is a room (channel) in which people wish
to talk to each other simultaneously. To avoid confusion, people could take turns
speaking (time division), speak at different pitches (frequency division), or speak in
different languages (code division). CDMA is analogous to the last example where
people speaking the same language can understand each other, but other languages
are perceived as noise and rejected. Similarly, in radio CDMA, each group of users is
given a shared code. Many codes occupy the same channel, but only users associated
with a particular code can communicate.
In general, CDMA belongs to two basic categories: synchronous (orthogonal codes) and
asynchronous (pseudorandom codes).

The digital modulation method is analogous to those used in simple radio transceivers.
In the analog case, a low-frequency data signal is time-multiplied with a high-frequency
pure sine-wave carrier and transmitted. This is effectively a frequency convolution
(Wiener–Khinchin theorem) of the two signals, resulting in a carrier with narrow
sidebands. In the digital case, the sinusoidal carrier is replaced by Walsh functions.
These are binary square waves that form a complete orthonormal set. The data signal
is also binary and the time multiplication is achieved with a simple XOR function. This is
usually a Gilbert cell mixer in the circuitry.

When mobile-to-base links cannot be precisely coordinated, particularly due to the

mobility of the handsets, a different approach is required. Since it is not mathematically
possible to create signature sequences that are both orthogonal for arbitrarily random
starting points and which make full use of the code space, unique "pseudo-random" or
"pseudo-noise" sequences called spreading sequences are used in asynchronous CDMA
systems. A spreading sequence is a binary sequence that appears random but can be
reproduced in a deterministic manner by intended receivers. These spreading
sequences are used to encode and decode a user's signal in asynchronous CDMA in the
same manner as the orthogonal codes in synchronous CDMA (shown in the example
above). These spreading sequences are statistically uncorrelated, and the sum of a
large number of spreading sequences results in multiple access interference (MAI) that
is approximated by a Gaussian noise process (following the central limit theorem in
statistics). Gold codes are an example of a spreading sequence suitable for this
purpose, as there is low correlation between the codes. If all of the users are received
with the same power level, then the variance (e.g., the noise power) of the MAI
increases in direct proportion to the number of users. In other words, unlike
synchronous CDMA, the signals of other users will appear as noise to the signal of
interest and interfere slightly with the desired signal in proportion to number of users.
All forms of CDMA use the spread-spectrum spreading factor to allow receivers to
partially discriminate against unwanted signals. Signals encoded with the specified
spreading sequences are received, while signals with different sequences (or the same
sequences but different timing offsets) appear as wideband noise reduced by the
spreading factor.
Since each user generates MAI, controlling the signal strength is an important issue
with CDMA transmitters. A CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, or FDMA receiver can in
theory completely reject arbitrarily strong signals using different codes, time slots or
frequency channels due to the orthogonality of these systems. This is not true for
asynchronous CDMA; rejection of unwanted signals is only partial. If any or all of the
unwanted signals are much stronger than the desired signal, they will overwhelm it.
This leads to a general requirement in any asynchronous CDMA system to
approximately match the various signal power levels as seen at the receiver. In CDMA
cellular, the base station uses a fast closed-loop power-control scheme to tightly control
each mobile's transmit power.
In 2019, schemes to precisely estimate the required length of the codes in dependence
of Doppler and delay characteristics have been developed.[19] Soon after, machine
learning based techniques that generate sequences of a desired length and spreading
properties have been published as well. These are highly competitive with the classic
Gold and Welch sequences. These are not generated by linear-feedback-shift-registers,
but have to be stored in lookup tables.

Asynchronous CDMA offers a key advantage in the flexible allocation of resources i.e.
allocation of spreading sequences to active users. In the case of CDM (synchronous
CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA the number of simultaneous orthogonal codes, time slots,
and frequency slots respectively are fixed, hence the capacity in terms of the number of
simultaneous users is limited. There are a fixed number of orthogonal codes, time slots
or frequency bands that can be allocated for CDM, TDMA, and FDMA systems, which
remain underutilized due to the bursty nature of telephony and packetized data
transmissions. There is no strict limit to the number of users that can be supported in
an asynchronous CDMA system, only a practical limit governed by the desired bit error
probability since the SIR (signal-to-interference ratio) varies inversely with the number
of users. In a bursty traffic environment like mobile telephony, the advantage afforded
by asynchronous CDMA is that the performance (bit error rate) is allowed to fluctuate
randomly, with an average value determined by the number of users times the
percentage of utilization. Suppose there are 2N users that only talk half of the time,
then 2N users can be accommodated with the same average bit error probability
as N users that talk all of the time. The key difference here is that the bit error
probability for N users talking all of the time is constant, whereas it is
a random quantity (with the same mean) for 2N users talking half of the time.
In other words, asynchronous CDMA is ideally suited to a mobile network where large
numbers of transmitters each generate a relatively small amount of traffic at irregular
intervals. CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA systems cannot recover the
underutilized resources inherent to bursty traffic due to the fixed number
of orthogonal codes, time slots or frequency channels that can be assigned to individual
transmitters. For instance, if there are N time slots in a TDMA system and 2N users that
talk half of the time, then half of the time there will be more than N users needing to
use more than N time slots. Furthermore, it would require significant overhead to
continually allocate and deallocate the orthogonal-code, time-slot or frequency-channel
resources. By comparison, asynchronous CDMA transmitters simply send when they
have something to say and go off the air when they do not, keeping the same signature
sequence as long as they are connected to the system.
Most modulation schemes try to minimize the bandwidth of this signal since bandwidth
is a limited resource. However, spread-spectrum techniques use a transmission
bandwidth that is several orders of magnitude greater than the minimum required
signal bandwidth. One of the initial reasons for doing this was military applications
including guidance and communication systems. These systems were designed using
spread spectrum because of its security and resistance to jamming. Asynchronous
CDMA has some level of privacy built in because the signal is spread using a pseudo-
random code; this code makes the spread-spectrum signals appear random or have
noise-like properties. A receiver cannot demodulate this transmission without
knowledge of the pseudo-random sequence used to encode the data. CDMA is also
resistant to jamming. A jamming signal only has a finite amount of power available to
jam the signal. The jammer can either spread its energy over the entire bandwidth of
the signal or jam only part of the entire signal.[17][18]
CDMA can also effectively reject narrow-band interference. Since narrow-band
interference affects only a small portion of the spread-spectrum signal, it can easily be
removed through notch filtering without much loss of information. Convolution
encoding and interleaving can be used to assist in recovering this lost data. CDMA
signals are also resistant to multipath fading. Since the spread-spectrum signal occupies
a large bandwidth, only a small portion of this will undergo fading due to multipath at
any given time. Like the narrow-band interference, this will result in only a small loss of
data and can be overcome.
Another reason CDMA is resistant to multipath interference is because the delayed
versions of the transmitted pseudo-random codes will have poor correlation with the
original pseudo-random code, and will thus appear as another user, which is ignored at
the receiver. In other words, as long as the multipath channel induces at least one chip
of delay, the multipath signals will arrive at the receiver such that they are shifted in
time by at least one chip from the intended signal. The correlation properties of the
pseudo-random codes are such that this slight delay causes the multipath to appear
uncorrelated with the intended signal, and it is thus ignored.
Some CDMA devices use a rake receiver, which exploits multipath delay components to
improve the performance of the system. A rake receiver combines the information from
several correlators, each one tuned to a different path delay, producing a stronger
version of the signal than a simple receiver with a single correlation tuned to the path
delay of the strongest signal.[1][2]
Frequency reuse is the ability to reuse the same radio channel frequency at other cell
sites within a cellular system. In the FDMA and TDMA systems, frequency planning is an
important consideration. The frequencies used in different cells must be planned
carefully to ensure signals from different cells do not interfere with each other. In a
CDMA system, the same frequency can be used in every cell, because channelization is
done using the pseudo-random codes. Reusing the same frequency in every cell
eliminates the need for frequency planning in a CDMA system; however, planning of the
different pseudo-random sequences must be done to ensure that the received signal
from one cell does not correlate with the signal from a nearby cell.[1]
Since adjacent cells use the same frequencies, CDMA systems have the ability to
perform soft hand-offs. Soft hand-offs allow the mobile telephone to communicate
simultaneously with two or more cells. The best signal quality is selected until the hand-
off is complete. This is different from hard hand-offs utilized in other cellular systems.
In a hard-hand-off situation, as the mobile telephone approaches a hand-off, signal
strength may vary abruptly. In contrast, CDMA systems use the soft hand-off, which is
undetectable and provides a more reliable and higher-quality signal.[2]