An efficient direct-sequence signal detector based on Dempster-Shafer theory

The detection of direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals is studied. Consideration is given to the environment of broadband noise jamming with the assumption that jammer state information is unknown. It is shown how the Dempster-Shafer theory can be applied to this problem; in particular, the authors treat the unknown jammer state information as uncertain and use the concept of `confidence discount´ and Dempster´s combining rule to derive a heuristic detector for the problem. They show that the resulting detector has a better performance than the hard-decision detector and the soft-decision detector when the jammer is significant. The degradation relative to the soft-decision detector is smaller than the hard-decision detector when the jammer is low