Comprehensive Rake-a novel and practical receiver architecture offering improved performance

This paper describes a novel and practical Rake receiver architecture for demodulation of spread spectrum signals in a multipath propagation environment offering significant benefits over existing architectures. Previous designs of Rake receiver were ineffective at combining the energy from a large number of multipath components, particularly for rapidly changing channels. The new type of receiver described here combines the functions of the searcher needed for initial signal acquisition with those of the Rake processor. The result is a practical implementation which is able, optimally, to adjust to the changing channel conditions at all times