Joint detection with coherent receiver antenna diversity in CDMA mobile radio systems

In code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile radio systems, both intersymbol interference and multiple access interference arise which can be combated by using either elaborate optimum or favorable suboptimum joint detection (JD) techniques. Furthermore, the time variation of the radio channels leads to degradations of the receiver performance. These degradations can be reduced by applying diversity techniques. Using coherent receiver antenna diversity (CRAD) is especially attractive because only the signal processing at the receiver must be modified. In the present paper, the application of CRAD to the more critical uplink of CDMA mobile radio systems with suboptimum JD techniques is investigated for maximal-ratio combining. The authors study six different suboptimum JD techniques based on decorrelating matched filtering, Gauss-Markov estimation, and minimum mean square error estimation with and without decision feedback. These six suboptimum JD techniques which are well-known for single antenna receivers are extended for the application to CRAD. A main concern of the paper is the determining of the SNR performance of the presented JD techniques for CRAD and the achievable average uncoded bit error probabilities for the transmission over rural area, typical urban and bad urban mobile radio channels are determined.