The proponents of CDMA have claimed bandwidth efficiency of up to 13 times that of TDMA and between 20 to 40 times that of analog transmission. Moreover, they note that its spread-spectrum technology is both more secure and offers higher transmission quality than TDMA because of its increased resistance to multipath distortion.
The defenders of TDMA, on the other hand, point out that to date there has been no successful major trial of CDMA technology that support the capacity claims. Moreover, they point out that the theoretical improvements in bandwidth efficiency claimed for CDMA are now being approached by enhancements to TDMA technology. The evolution of TDMA will allow capacity increases of 20 to 40 fold over analog in the near future. This combined with the vastly more expensive technology needed for CDMA ($300,000 per base station compared with $80,000 for TDMA) calls into question what real savings CDMA technology can offer. So far, IS–136 TDMA is the proven leader as the most economical digital migration path for an existing AMPS network.
We still lack the final word in this debate. However, it seems clear that for the near future at least, TDMA will remain the dominant technology in the wireless market.
Cellular Access Technologies: CDMA
CDMA takes an entirely different approach from TDMA. CDMA, after digitizing data, spreads it out over the entire available bandwidth. Multiple calls are overlaid on each other on the channel, with each assigned a unique sequence code. CDMA is a form of spread spectrum, which simply means that data is sent in small pieces over a number of the discrete frequencies available for use at any time in the specified range.
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All of the users transmit in the same wide-band chunk of spectrum. Each user's signal is spread over the entire bandwidth by a unique spreading code. At the receiver, that same unique code is used to recover the signal. Because CDMA systems need to put an accurate time-stamp on each piece of a signal, it references the GPS system for this information. Between eight and 10 separate calls can be carried in the same channel space as one analog AMPS call. CDMA technology is the basis for Interim Standard 95 (IS-95) and operates in both the 800-MHz and 1900-MHz frequency bands.
Ideally, TDMA and CDMA are transparent to each other. In practice, high-power CDMA signals raise the noise floor for TDMA receivers, and high-power TDMA signals can cause overloading and jamming of CDMA receivers.
In the next section, you'll learn about the difference between cellular and PCS services.
