Grouped RAKE finger management principle for wideband CDMA

A RAKE finger allocation algorithm for direct-sequence spread-spectrum systems is presented and analyzed. The RAKE finger allocation method is based on grouped RAKE finger assignment. The detected code phases with greatest power are assigned a group of RAKE fingers with equal spacing around the detected code phase. Allocating the RAKE fingers with spacing less than one chip period can reduce overhead for delay tracking. The grouped RAKE finger allocation principle is compared to single RAKE finger allocation. Allocating three RAKE fingers with T/sub c//2 spacing gives a 0.2-0.4 dB gain compared to single RAKE finger assignment with the same number of RAKE and tracking fingers.