A Criterion for Adaptive Rake/Equalizer Configuration of Mobile Receivers

This paper introduces a low-complexity criterion enabling a reconfigurable receiver to select dynamically the most appropriate configuration between a Rake receiver and a chip-level equalizer in the downlink of a DS-CDMA system. To this end, the proposed criterion accounts for the frequency selectivity of the channel and the signal to noise ratio in a natural and integrated fashion, so that the criterion value provides a rough estimate of the minimum performance gain the equalizer can achieve with respect to the Rake receiver. This latter feature allows the receiver selection to be performed according to a performance/complexity trade-off, without activating any of the receivers. Simulation results in the context of a WCDMA downlink show the practical efficiency of the proposed approach