By exploiting analytical and semianalytical methodologies, performance of DS-CDMA system for picocellular applications, including multipath propagation channels and Rake receiver, is evaluated.System performance is defined in terms of both mean bit error probability and outage probability, taking the exact evaluation of spreading codes correlation into account. The spreading sequences investigated include some well known two-level sequences and the recently investigated multilevel sequences with complex mapping. By varying spreading codes and propagation channel conditions, the following aspects have been considered in the numerical results: comparison of Rake receivers and simple correlator receiver, tradeoff between receiving taps number and performance, degradation effects due to not ideal spreading code correlation, comparison between binary and multilevel sequences.