difference of cdma and wcdma
CDMA (IS-95,IS-2000 and EVDO) are the technologies which are developed accordig to the 3GPP2 standards. WCDMA(Wideband CDMA) is an evolution to the GSM family(GSM,GPRS,EDGE,WCDMA,HSDPA).
CDMA's architecture is based on IS-41 core network standards whereas WCDMA still based on GSM-MAP based core network.
CDMA's architecture has network elements like MS, BTS, BSC, MSC, HLR, VLR, PCF, PDSN etc. And WCDMA has NodeB (i.e BTS), UE( i.e.MS), MSC, RNC, SGSN , GGSN, HLR,VLR, MGW etc depeding on the releases( i.e. R99,R4 or R5).
The similarity between these 2 technologies is the air interface. The air iterface is similar and not exactly same. The air interface uses Code Division Multiple Access technique for different users. BOth technologies work on similar principles on Air interface such as Soft Handoff/Handover, Power control, Universal frequency reuse etc. But their Core network work differently ( i.e. IS-41 for CDMA and GSM-MAP for WCDMA).