EM-Based Multiuser Detection in Fast Fading Multipath Environments

Abstract

Journal PaperWe address the problem of multiuser detection in fast fading multipath environments for DS-CDMA systems. In fast fading scenarios, temporal variations of the channel cause significant performance degradation even with the RAKE receiver. We use a previously introduced Time-Frequency (TF) RAKE receiver based on a canonical formulation of the channel and signals to simultaneously combat fading and multipath effects. This receiver uses the Doppler spread caused by rapid time-varying channel as another means of diversity. In dealing with multiaccess interference and as an attempt to avoid the prohibitive computational complexity of the optimum Maximum-Likelihood (ML) detector, we use the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to derive an approximate ML detector. The new detector turns out to have an iterative structure very similar to the well-known multistage detector, but because of using the EM algorithm, it has better convergence properties than the multistage detector.Noki