A Blind RAKE Receiver With Robust Multiuser Interference Cancelation for DS/CDMA Communications

In this paper, a blind RAKE receiver with robust multiuser access interference cancellation is presented for frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. In contrast to a conventional receiver, here, only knowledge of the spreading code and rough timing of the desired user is required. By investigating the code space of the multipath signals and the data vector space, a RAKE filtering vector is developed to extract the desired data from all the paths of the desired user. Our proposed technique not only exploits the characteristics of multipath propagation but also the characteristics of timing offsets that may occur in the receiver, to facilitate the application of a blind linear filter-optimization technique for robust interference suppression. Based on the RAKE filtering vector, interference rejection is implemented by using the auxiliary-vector (AV) technique. Our approach, however, effectively overcomes the sensitivity of the original AV method to multipath propagation and timing offsets. To mitigate the signal cancellation at relatively high signal-to-interference and noise ratios (SINR) resulting from the estimation errors of the RAKE filtering vector, robust strategies are introduced in addition to the linear filter optimization. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.