Iterative Group-Blind Multiuser Detection and Decoding With Signal Rank Estimation for Coded CDMA Systems

In this paper, a turbo receiver structure is proposed for the uplink of coded code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems in the presence of unknown users. The proposed receiver consists of two stages following each other. The first stage performs soft interference cancellation and group-blind linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) filtering, and the second stage performs channel decoding. The proposed group-blind linear MMSE filter suppresses the residual multiple-access interference (MAI) from known users based on the spreading sequences and the channel characteristics of these users while suppressing the interference from other unknown users using a subspace-based blind method. The proposed receiver is suitable for suppressing intercell interference in heavily loaded CDMA systems. Since the knowledge of the number of unknown users is crucial for the proposed receiver structure, a novel estimator is also proposed to estimate the number of unknown users in the system by exploiting the statistical properties of the received signal. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed estimator can provide the number of unknown users with high accuracy; in addition, the proposed group-blind receiver integrated with the new estimator can significantly outperform the conventional turbo multiuser detector in the presence of unknown users.