Maximum-likelihood synchronization of a single user for code-division multiple-access communication systems

Code-division multiple access (CDMA) has emerged as an access protocol well-suited for voice and data transmission. One significant limitation of the conventional CDMA system is the near-far problem where strong signals interfere with the detection of a weak signal. Multiuser detectors assume knowledge of all of the modulation waveforms and channel parameters, and exploit this information to eliminate multiple-access interference (MAI) and to achieve near-far resistance. A major problem in practical application of multiuser detection is the estimation of the signal and channel parameters in a near-far limited system. We consider maximum-likelihood estimation of users delay, amplitude, and phase in a CDMA communication system. We present an approach for decomposing this multiuser estimation problem into a series of single-user problems. In this method the interfering users are treated as colored non-Gaussian noise. The observation vectors are preprocessed to be able to apply a Gaussian model for the MAI. The maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE) of each user´s parameters based on the processed observation vectors becomes tractable. The estimator includes a whitening filter derived from the sample covariance matrix which is used to suppress the MAI, thus yielding a near-far resistant estimator