Performance of a CDMA beamforming array-receiver in spatially-correlated Rayleigh-fading multipath

In previous work we proposed an array-receiver that implements coherent maximum ratio combining (MRC) in space and time in a 2D-RAKE structure. In this contribution we evaluate different versions of this combiner in spatially-correlated Rayleigh fading and compare them to previous array-receiver solutions. Simulation results indicate that the proposed versions are more sensitive to spatial correlation, especially those which better exploit spatial combining. However, they still offer the best performance even in very poor spatial diversity situations. Results also suggest that concatenated processing of the spatio-temporal components significantly increases robustness to correlation and further improves the performance advantage over 2D-RAKE structures.