Particle filtering for joint symbol and parameter estimation in DS spread spectrum systems

In this paper, we develop a new receiver for joint symbol, channel characteristics and code delay estimation for DS spread spectrum systems under conditions of multipath fading. This nonlinear estimation problem is extremely complex. An efficient simulation-based algorithm based on particle filtering is proposed to solve it. The method combines sequential importance sampling, a selection scheme and a variance reduction technique. An extensive simulation study is carried out and demonstrates good performance of the suggested approach.