Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
CDMA is based around a form of transmission known as Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum. The
CDMA history can be directly linked back to the 1940s when this form of transmission was first
envisaged. As electronics technology improved, it started to be used for covert military
transmissions in view of the facts that the transmissions look like noise, it is difficult to decipher
without the knowledge of the right codes, and furthermore it is difficult to jam. With the
revolution in cellular telecommunications that occurred in the 1980s a then little know company
named Qualcomm working on DSSS transmissions started to look at this as the basis for a
cellular telecommunications multiple access scheme - CDMA - code division multiple access.
The concept of CDMA had to proved in the field and accordingly Qualcomm was joined by US
network operators Nynex and Ameritech to develop the first experimental CDMA system. Later
the team was expanded as Motorola and AT&T (now Lucent) joined to bring their resources to
speed development. As a result this it was possible to start writing a specification for CDMA in
1990. With the support of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and the
Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) a standards group was set up. This group then
published the standard for the first CDMA system in the form of IS-95, resulting in the formal
publication of IS-95-A in 1995. The first CDMA system was launched in September 1995 by
Hutchison Telephone Co. Ltd. in Hong Kong and SK Telecom in Korea soon followed along
with networks in the USA.
This was only one cellular telecommunications system, although it was the first. Its development
lead on to the CDMA2000 series of standards. The use of CDMA did not stop with CDMA2000
as it became necessary to evolve the GSM standard so that it could carry data and provide
significant improvements in terms of spectrum use efficiency. Accordingly CDMA, in the form
of Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) was adopted for this standard.
Key elements of CDMA
CDMA is a form of spread spectrum transmission technology. It has a number of
distinguishing features that are key to spread spectrum transmission technologies:
Use of wide bandwidth: CDMA, like other spread spectrum technologies uses a
wider bandwidth than would otherwise be needed fort he transmission of the data.
This results in a number of advantages including an increased immunity to
interference or jamming, and multiple user access.
Spreading codes used: In order to achieve the increased bandwidth, the data is
spread by use of a code which is independent of the data.
Level of security: In order to receive the data, the receiver must have a knowledge
of the spreading code, without this it is not possible to decipher the transmitted data,
and this gives a measure of security.
Multiple access: The use of the spreading codes which are independent for each
user along with synchronous reception allow multiple users to access the same
channel simultaneously.
paid for these schemes to overcome the CDMA near far problem, they operate well
and enable significant gains to be made by using CDMA over previous technologies.