The performance of a beamformer-RAKE receiver for WCDMA mobile communication system

A beamformer-RAKE receiver (see Naguib, A.F., "Adaptive Antennas for CDMA Wireless Networks", Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996) takes advantage of both the spatial and temporal processing associated with a beamformer and a RAKE receiver respectively. We investigate the performance of a beamformer-RAKE receiver at the uplink of the wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) system. The receiver exploits the maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (MSINR) criterion (see Litva, J. and Lo, T.K., "Digital Beamforming in Wireless Communications", Artech House, Boston, 1996) to form the beams in the spatial domain. The blind code gated algorithm (CGA) (see Vasavada, Y.M. et al., Proc. 34th Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2000) is employed to realize the MSINR criterion. We compare the CGA with the modified code filtering approach (CFA) (see Kwon, S. et al., Proc. IEEE Vehicular Tech. Conf., p.1890-4, 1999 ). The performance gain of a beamformer-RAKE compared to a conventional RAKE receiver is demonstrated.