Design and experimental characterization of a RAKE receiver for a mobile station of a DS-CDMA system

The design and the realization of a new DS-CDMA (direct sequence code division multiple access) three arms RAKE receiver for a mobile station is presented. This receiver makes use of a pilot signal for the chip synchronization and for the channel equalization. It has been experimentally characterized by means of a flexible and effective laboratory test bed and the results of a measurement campaign performed at 2.5 Mchip/s with different propagation scenarios and variable number of interferers are reported. Finally some considerations about the performance improvement given by various hardware and software demodulator architectures are given.