Simulated BER performance of, and initial hardware results from, the uplink in the U.K. LINK-CDMA testbed

A brief description is given of the background to the UK´s LINK CDMA initiative which has now reached a successful conclusion. The digital architecture of the up-link base station RAKE receiver is outlined along with the multipath channel simulator. Bit error rate results are presented from the hardware demonstrator of the RAKE receiver operating over a hardware two tap channel emulator. In addition, further results are presented of simulations of the receiver on a simulated multipath channel with Doppler fading. The effect of the channel estimation system is investigated and shown to introduce a 2 dB to 4 dB degradation in performance when estimating the channel compared to having perfect knowledge of the channel. Furthermore, it was found that there was no appreciable difference in overall BER performance of the receiver when channel estimation was performed on quasi-static or time varying channels