Channel estimation and signal enhancement for DS-CDMA systems

This dissertation focuses on topics of Bayesian-based multiuser detection, space-time (S-T) transceiver design, and S-T channel parameter estimation for direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems. Using the Bayesian framework, various linear and simplified nonlinear multiuser detectors are proposed, and their performances are analyzed. The simplified non-linear Bayesian solutions can bridge the performance gap between sub-optimal linear multiuser detectors and the optimum multiuser detector. To further improve the system capacity and performance, S-T transceiver design approaches with complexity constraint are investigated. Novel S-T receivers of low-complexity that jointly use the temporal code-signature and the spatial signature are proposed. Our solutions, which lead to generalized near-far resistant S-T RAKE receivers, achieve better interference suppression than the existing S-T RAKE receivers. From transmitter side, we also proposed a transmit diversity (TD) technique in combination with differential detection for the DS-CDMA systems. It is shown that the proposed S-T TD scheme in combination with minimum variance distortionless response transceiver (STTD+MVDR) is near-far resistant and outperforms the conventional STTD and matched filter based (STTD+MF) transceiver scheme. Obtaining channel state information (CSI) is instrumental to optimum S-T transceiver design in wireless systems. Another major focus of this dissertation is to estimate the S-T channel parameters. We proposed an asymptotic, joint maximum likelihood (ML) method of estimating multipath channel parameters for DS-CDMA systems. An iterative estimator is proposed to further simplify the computation. Analytical and simulation results show that the iterative estimation scheme is near-far resistant for both time delays and DOAs. And it reaches the corresponding CRBs after a few iterations

Interference suppression and diversity for CDMA systems

In code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems, due to non-orthogonality of the spreading codes and multipath channels, the desired signal suffers interference from other users. Signal fading due to multipath propagation is another source of impairment in wireless CDMA systems, often severely impacting performance. In this dissertation, reduced-rank minimum mean square error (MMSE) receiver and reduced-rank minimum variance receiver are investigated to suppress interference; transmit diversity is applied to multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) systems to combat fading; packet combing is studied to provide both interference suppression and diversity for CDMA random access systems. The reduced-rank MMSE receiver that uses a reduced-rank estimated covariance matrix is studied to improve the performance of MMSE receiver in CDMA systems. It is shown that the reduced-rank MMSE receiver has much better performance than the full-rank MMSE receiver when the covariance matrix is estimated by using a finite number of data samples and the desired signal is in a low dimensional subspace. It is also demonstrated that the reduced-rank minimum variance receiver outperforms the full-rank minimum variance receiver. The probability density function of the output SNR of the full-rank and reduced-rank linear MMSE estimators is derived for a general linear signal model under the assumption that the signals and noise are Gaussian distributed. Space-time coding that is originally proposed for narrow band systems is applied to an MC-CDMA system in order to get transmit diversity for such a wideband system. Some techniques to jointly decode the space-time code and suppress interference are developed. The channel estimation using either pilot channels or pilot symbols is studied for MC-CDMA systems with space-time coding. Performance of CDMA random access systems with packet combining in fading channels is analyzed. By combining the current retransmitted packet with all its previous transmitted copies, the receiver obtains a diversity gain plus an increased interference and noise suppression gain. Therefore, the bit error rate dramatically decreases with the number of transmissions increasing, which in turn improves the system throughput and reduces the average delay