Differentially coherent decorrelating detector for CDMA single-path time-varying Rayleigh fading channels

This paper describes a differentially coherent decorrelating detector for a K-user reverse link code-division multiple-access environment that exhibits time-varying Rayleigh fading. The channel is modeled as providing only a single fading path for each user and with no additional means to achieve diversity. The design of the detector is based on using fractionally sampled matched filter outputs to simultaneously achieve two goals: 1) the novel realization of a one shot decorrelator with lower computational complexity and 2) the forming of the maximum-likelihood decision rule on the decorrelated outputs, which results in an effective increase of the correlation in the fading process. Analytical evaluation and simulation of the error probability of the detector demonstrates significant lowering of the error floor in comparison to the decorrelating detector that employs conventional differentially coherent detection