Robust direction of arrival estimation for CDMA signals in impulsive noise

Direction of arrival estimation schemes based on multiuser detection for CDMA signals are investigated. The paper reports the performance improvements achieved by the linear decorrelator and the nonlinear M-regression decorrelator over the conventional matched filter scheme combined with the subspace-based MUSIC algorithm. The near-far resistant properties of the decorrelators show improved bearing estimation performance in the presence of strong interference. In particular, the minimax M-regression decorrelator combined with the MUSIC algorithm achieves an excellent performance trade-off by performing satisfactorily over the entire range of noise distributions, which, on the other hand, is unattainable by the ROC-MUSIC scheme.