Performance comparison of multi-stage SIC and limited tree-search detection in CDMA

A rich array of detector structures for CDMA, offering a multitude of trade-offs between performance and complexity have been proposed. In this paper we consider two detector structures that are based on very different principles but represent a similar level of detection complexity. Through simulations the performance of multi-stage successive interference cancellation schemes with either a hard-decision or a clipped soft-decision limiter are compared to similar complexity limited tree-search detectors. The performance is evaluated over single-path and multipath channels.