Effect of pulse noise jamming and phase noise on a coherent RAKE receiver with maximum-likelihood detection and convolutional coding

The effect of pulse noise jamming and phase noise on a coherent RAKE receiver with convolutional coding is analyzed. The effect of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is also included in the analysis. The maximum-likelihood RAKE receiver for the combination of pulse noise and AWGN is derived. Pulse jamming usually has a significant effect when soft decision decoding is used, however, we show that the maximum-likelihood RAKE receiver effectively mitigates the effects of the pulse noise jammer. Phase noise causes an irreducible error floor when soft decision decoding is used. The maximum-likelihood RAKE receiver with hard decision decoding reduces the effect of pulse noise jamming and can provide performance below the irreducible error floor obtained with soft decision decoding.