Viterbi decoding with per-survivor processing of adaptive array antenna

The adaptive array technique is expected to reduce the multipath fading that causes degradation of bit error rate (BER) performance in the future broadband wireless systems. Some prior works proposed the joint schemes of the adaptive array and the equalizer technique, however few reports discuss the combination of a forward error correction scheme and the adaptive array. We propose a novel combination scheme of Viterbi decoding and the adaptive array based on a per-survivor processing. In the proposed scheme, each state of the Viterbi decoder has array weights that are adaptively updated along with the surviving paths. The proposed scheme has a coding effect on the weight estimation without decoding delay and estimates the accurate weights. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by computer simulation. The results of computer simulation show that the proposed scheme provides good tracking performance to the interference and good performance in terms of BER under the severe low carrier-to-interference power ratio (CIR) environments.