Acquisition performance of an adaptive receiver for DS-CDMA

This paper presents a single-user code timing estimation algorithm for direct-sequence code-division multiple access that is based on processing the weight vector of an adaptive filter. The filter weight vector can be shown to adapt in the mean to a scaled time-shifted version of the spreading code of the desired user. Therefore, our algorithm requires very little side information in order to form its estimate. The acquisition performance of the algorithm is investigated when the filter is adapted using the least mean square (LMS) or the recursive least square (RLS) algorithm. The proposed algorithm is shown through experimental results to be resistant to the near-far problem when the RLS adaptation algorithm is used, but not when the LMS algorithm is used. However, the performance of this code-acquisition technique is still substantially better than the traditional correlator-based approach, even when the computationally simple LMS algorithm is used. As an extension to the basic timing estimator algorithm, we consider the effect of frequency synchronization error on the performance of the timing estimate. As expected, frequency-offset error degrades the performance of the timing estimate. However, a modified version of the adaptive filter is presented to combat this effect.