This paper provides a broad overview of the multiuser detection literature of the past few years in a nonmathematical, easily accessible approach. The treatment is then extended to the comparative study of channel-quality controlled burst-by-burst (BbB) adaptive code division multiple access (CDMA) detection such as parallel interference cancellation, successive interference cancellation, and joint detection (JD
I. MOTIVATIONMobile propagation channels exhibit time-variant propagation properties [1]. Although, apart from simple cordless telephoneschemes,mostmobileradiosystemsemploypowercontrol for mitigating the effects of received power fluctuations, rapid channel quality fluctuations cannot be compensated by practical, finite reaction-time power control schemes. Furthermore, the ubiquitous phenomenon of signal dispersion due to the multiplicity of scatering and reflecting objects cannot be mitigated by power control. Similarly, other performance lim- iting factors, such as adjacent-channel and cochannel intereference as well as multiuser interference (MUI) vary as a function of time. The ultimate channel quality metric is the bit-error rate (BER), regardless of the specific channel impairments encountered. The channel quality variations are typically higher near the fringes of the propagation cell or when moving from an indoor scenario to an outdoor cell due to the high standard deviation of the shadow fading and fast fading [1] encountered, even in conjunction with agile power control. Furthermore, the bit errors typically occur in bursts due to the time-variant channel quality fluctuations; hence, it is plausible that a fixed transceiver mode cannot achieve a high flexibility in such environments. The design of powerful and flexible transceivers [2]-[4] has to be based on finding the best compromise among a number of contradicting design factors [2]- [4]. Some of these factors are low power consumption, high robustness against transmission errors among various channel conditions, high spectral efficiency, low-delay for the sake of supporting interactive real-time multimedia services, high-capacity networking, and so forth [5]. In this paper, we will address a few of these issues in the context of direct sequence code division multiple access [6] (DS-CDMA) systems, 1 since CDMA is the solution standardized in all three recently ratified global mobile 1 The simple philosophy of DS-CDMA is that a binary bit of a user is signaled to the receiver with the aid of a unique, user-specific signature sequence. The DS spreading sequences may be chosen such that they are orthogonal to each other; hence, the individual users' signals do not interfere with each other, provided that the transmission channel does not destroy the orthogonality of the DS spreading sequences. When the orthogonality of the DS spreading codes is retained at the receiver, no MUI is inflicted; hence, a simple correlator is capable of detecting the codes of the users conveying the information with the aid of the code's polarity. By contrast, if the...