Differential and coherent RAKE receivers for DS-CDMA in frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels.

Abstract

The performance of digital communications over frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels can be quite poor, thus diminishing, the capacity of a DS-CDMA system. This thesis compares differential detection, multiple symbol differential detection and pilot symbol-aided coherent detection of a direct-sequence spread spectrum signal for this channel. Diversity reception is obtained through RAKE reception, and both equal gain and maximal gain diversity combining are considered. The improvement provided by some error correcting convolutional codes arid interleaving are also studied.