SOVA equalization for multi-code CDMA system with low spreading factor

In a CDMA system, the RAKE receiver is commonly used to attain the diversity gain by taking advantage of the good correlation properties of the spreading codes. However, at low spreading gains the good correlation properties of the spreading codes are lost and the RAKE receiver performance is severely degraded by interpath interference (IPI). In the case of multi-code CDMA system, the multi-code interference (MCI) exists in the system. In order to suppress MPI and MCI, a novel receiver based on soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) equalization is proposed in this paper. The SOVA equalization is applied to symbol sequences after RAKE combining and MCI cancellation to effectively eliminate the IPI during transmission of high rate data in wideband DS-CDMA systems. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver significantly outperform the traditional RAKE and RAKE-VA receivers.