Editing Code-division multiple access (section)

===Advantages of asynchronous CDMA over other techniques===

====Efficient practical utilization of the fixed frequency spectrum====
In theory CDMA, TDMA and FDMA have exactly the same spectral efficiency, but, in practice, each has its own challenges – power control in the case of CDMA, timing in the case of TDMA, and frequency generation/filtering in the case of FDMA.

TDMA systems must carefully synchronize the transmission times of all the users to ensure that they are received in the correct time slot and do not cause interference.  Since this cannot be perfectly controlled in a mobile environment, each time slot must have a guard time, which reduces the probability that users will interfere, but decreases the spectral efficiency.

Similarly, FDMA systems must use a guard band between adjacent channels, due to the unpredictable [[Doppler effect|Doppler shift]] of the signal spectrum because of user mobility. The guard bands will reduce the probability that adjacent channels will interfere, but decrease the utilization of the spectrum.

====Flexible allocation of resources====
Asynchronous CDMA offers a key advantage in the flexible allocation of resources i.e. allocation of spreading sequences to active users.  In the case of CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA the number of simultaneous orthogonal codes, time slots, and frequency slots respectively are fixed, hence the capacity in terms of the number of simultaneous users is limited. There are a fixed number of orthogonal codes, time slots or frequency bands that can be allocated for CDM, TDMA, and FDMA systems, which remain underutilized due to the bursty nature of telephony and packetized data transmissions.  There is no strict limit to the number of users that can be supported in an asynchronous CDMA system, only a practical limit governed by the desired bit error probability since the SIR (signal-to-interference ratio) varies inversely with the number of users.  In a bursty traffic environment like mobile telephony, the advantage afforded by asynchronous CDMA is that the performance (bit error rate) is allowed to fluctuate randomly, with an average value determined by the number of users times the percentage of utilization.  Suppose there are 2''N'' users that only talk half of the time, then 2''N'' users can be accommodated with the same ''average'' bit error probability as ''N'' users that talk all of the time.  The key difference here is that the bit error probability for ''N'' users talking all of the time is constant, whereas it is a ''random'' quantity (with the same mean) for 2''N'' users talking half of the time.

In other words, asynchronous CDMA is ideally suited to a mobile network where large numbers of transmitters each generate a relatively small amount of traffic at irregular intervals. CDM (synchronous CDMA), TDMA, and FDMA systems cannot recover the underutilized resources inherent to bursty traffic due to the fixed number of [[orthogonal]] codes, time slots or frequency channels that can be assigned to individual transmitters. For instance, if there are ''N'' time slots in a TDMA system and 2''N'' users that talk half of the time, then half of the time there will be more than ''N'' users needing to use more than ''N'' time slots.  Furthermore, it would require significant overhead to continually allocate and deallocate the orthogonal-code, time-slot or frequency-channel resources. By comparison, asynchronous CDMA transmitters simply send when they have something to say and go off the air when they do not, keeping the same signature sequence as long as they are connected to the system.