Ever increasing demand for data transfer speed and consequently bandwidth poses new challenges. Digital modulation techniques have contributed a lot to increase the capacity, data rates and quality of network. WCDMA is a high potential technique being rapidly adopted by the industry. This paper presents a simulation technique to enable select better digital modulation scheme for WCDMA. The paper highlights the results of this simulation for BPSK, QPSK, 8-PSK modulation models over AWGN fading channel for WCDMA.Keyword: WCDMA, spread spectrum DSSS, spreading, despreading, AWGN, BER.
I. BACKGROUNDThe fusion of mobility with communication has completely revolutionized everyday life with technology advancing from one generation to the next. First generation provided only voice services while the second bought in more facilities like fax, data and messaging. Hunger for more demanding services like multimedia became unquenchable giving rise to increased bit rate being the prime feature of third and next generations.Evolution of wireless began with wireless analog networks termed as first generation. It provided merely voice services while the second generation (2G) added medium bit rate data services. GSM and CDMA were the main 2G technologies. Applications like video calling, online shopping etc. began to emerge which 2G failed to cater, as it needed higher speed services. This resulted in evolution of 2.5G and 3G. 2.5G used GPRS and EDGE technologies to enhance the data capacity of GSM. With both voice and data traffic moving on the system, the need was felt to increase the data rates further. Then by use of sophisticated coding, the data rates could be increased to 384 kbps [1]. High data rate and spectral efficiency thus were main drives of 3G.