Capacity gains from pilot cancellation in CDMA networks

Abstract

Common Pilot cancellation in mobile receivers has recently gained attention for CDMA cellular networks [1-3]. This paper presents system simulation results showing that the network capacity gains achievable from both ideal and hardware resource limited pilot cancellation receivers are significant. We show that the highest gains are achieved for networks populated with high rate data users, rather than voice users. We also pay special attention to the interaction between pilot cancellation and soft handoff in a power controlled network. We show that pilot cancellation allows the network to operate with fewer mobiles in soft handoff, hence reducing network signaling overhead and infrastructure costs.