On the Achievable Information Rates of CDMA Downlink with Trivial Receivers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the information rates of a CDMA downlink with trivial, low-complexity receivers under noisy conditions, revealing non-trivial capacity results using statistical mechanics and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous analysis of the capacity of a complexity-constrained CDMA channel under noise, employing metastable states and finite-size simulations.

Findings

Non-trivial Shannon capacity under bounded noise

Outage capacity characterized for Gaussian noise

Finite-size simulations support theoretical results

Abstract

A noisy CDMA downlink channel operating under a strict complexity constraint on the receiver is introduced. According to this constraint, detected bits, obtained by performing hard decisions directly on the channel's matched filter output, must be the same as the transmitted binary inputs. This channel setting, allowing the use of the simplest receiver scheme, seems to be worthless, making reliable communication at any rate impossible. However, recently this communication paradigm was shown to yield valuable information rates in the case of a noiseless channel. This finding calls for the investigation of this attractive complexity-constrained transmission scheme for the more practical noisy channel case. By adopting the statistical mechanics notion of metastable states of the renowned Hopfield model, it is proved that under a bounded noise assumption such complexity-constrained CDMA channel gives rise to a non-trivial Shannon-theoretic capacity, rigorously analyzed and corroborated using finite-size channel simulations. For unbounded noise the channel's outage capacity is addressed and specifically described for the popular additive white Gaussian noise.