Time-selective signaling and reception for communication over multipath fading channels

The mobile wireless channel affords inherent diversity to combat the effects of fading. Existing code-division multiple-access systems, by virtue of spread-spectrum signaling and RAKE reception, exploit only part of the channel diversity via multipath combination. Moreover, their performance degrades under fast fading commonly encountered in mobile scenarios. In this paper, we develop new signaling and reception techniques that maximally exploit channel diversity via joint multipath-Doppler processing. Our approach is based on a canonical representation of the wireless channel, which leads to a time-frequency generalization of the RAKE receiver for diversity processing. Our signaling scheme facilitates joint multipath-Doppler diversity by spreading the symbol waveform beyond the intersymbol duration to make the channel time-selective. A variety of detection schemes are developed to account for the intersymbol interference (ISI) due to overlapping symbols. However, our results indicate that the effects of ISI are virtually negligible due to the excellent correlation properties of the pseudorandom codes. Performance analysis also shows that relatively small Doppler spreads can yield significant diversity gains. The inherently higher level of diversity achieved by time-selective signaling brings the fading channel closer to an additive white Gaussian noise channel, thereby facilitating the use of powerful existing coding techniques for Gaussian channels.