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Under the assumptions of symbol-synchronous transmissions and white Gaussian noise, the authors analyze the detection mechanism at the receiver, comparing different detectors by their bit error rates in the low-background-noise region and by their worst-case behavior in a near-far environment where the received energies of the users are not necessarily similar. Optimum multiuser detection achieves important performance gains over conventional single-user detection at the expense of computational complexity that grows exponentially with the number of users. It is shown that in the synchronous case the performance achieved by linear multiuser detectors is similar to that of optimum multiuser detection. Attention is focused on detectors whose linear memoryless transformation is a generalized inverse of the matrix of signature waveform crosscorrelations, and on the optimum linear detector. It is shown that the …