An adaptive multiuser detector with joint amplitude and delay estimation

A multiuser detector is developed in which the delays and amplitudes of the incoming waveforms are estimated recursively. The algorithm is an extension of the symbol-by-symbol detector of Abend and Fritchman, originally derived for intersymbol interference (ISI) channels, to the multiuser application. In order to make the multiuser detector adaptive, the likelihoods in the symbol-by-symbol metric update are approximated using a set of extended Kalman filter (EKF) innovations. The EKF´s provide, in addition to the likelihoods, joint estimates of the signal delays and amplitudes. The resulting algorithm is quite complex, due to the large number of possible composite symbols corresponding to the multiple users. However, it is shown that the likelihood computations and EKF updates can be expressed it terms of a set of cross-correlation functions, which need only be computed for a subset of the possible symbols. The cross-correlator outputs are updated at the bit rate, and thus the EKF and metric update computations need be performed only at a function of the spread-spectrum chip rate. A metric pruning technique is proposed that further reduces the number of EKF delay/amplitude estimators required. Finally, an important sampling simulation strategy is used to obtain bit-error rate estimates for the adaptive multiuser detector