A DS-CDMA tracking mode receiver with joint channel/delay estimation and MMSE detection

A tracking mode receiver for asynchronous direct-sequence CDMA is presented based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The EKF jointly estimates the delays and multipath coefficients of the received CDMA waveform, and provides a modified minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimate of the user data (MMSE-EKF). In order to obtain a practical algorithm, each user signal is tracked individually, with the remaining users modeled as colored Gaussian noise. However, the EKFs are coupled through the multiple access interference (MAI) covariance estimates. In order to obtain meaningful performance measures, approximate worst-case undesired user delays that minimize the desired user SNR and delay estimation Cramer-Rao bound are obtained. It is shown that such worst-case delays can be efficiently computed using the alternating maximization (A-M) algorithm. The resulting bit error rate (BER) performance of the MMSE-EKF tracking receiver is evaluated through a combination of simulation and analysis. The mean-time to lose lock (MTTLL) for a genie-aided EKF delay estimator is also obtained using the A-M computed delays