Asynchronous near-far resistant DS-CDMA receivers without a priori synchronization

Several receivers for data demodulation in an asynchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) system operating without prior knowledge of the propagation delays are proposed and compared. Special attention is paid to the near-far problem, and the proposed schemes are numerically shown to be near-far resistant. The near-far resistance is obtained by estimating the a priori unknown propagation delay using a subspace-based technique. Quantities obtained in the estimation procedure are used to design a filter used for suppression of interference, according to the minimum mean square error criterion. Either a decision feedback technique or a simple two-state Viterbi algorithm is subsequently used for the data demodulation in the uncoded case. By extending the trellis used in the Viterbi algorithm, error correcting coding is easily implemented.