Performance and power control in CDMA cellular mobile communications

Cellular mobile telephone networks in Australia use technologies based on either analog transmission or digital time-division multiple access transmission. A further proposal for digital systems is to use a system based on spread-spectrum techniques, known as code division multiple access or CDMA. This paper describes the basis of operation of CDMA cellular systems and then discusses traffic performance issues for CDMA, clearly distinguishing them from traditional schemes. These issues will include power control, soft handover and the trade-off between transmission speech quality and the number of calls carried in the system.