Channel Estimation Optimisation In Wideband DS-CDMA Rake Receivers

It is well established that the quality of the channel estimate plays a crucial role in the performance of a rake receiver. This paper addresses the problem of optimising the channel estimate for a wideband DS–CDMA rake receiver equipped with a sliding–window adaptive channel estimator. The mean squared error of the channel estimate is analytically extracted providing the means to optimise the window size in a minimum–MSE sense. Unfortunately, the BER at the output of the rake receiver is only partially analytically tractable, but minimum–BER optimisation of the window size is experimentally shown to outperform the MMSE criterion.