A family of suboptimum detectors for coherent multiuser communications

Consideration is given to a class of suboptimum detectors for data transmitted asynchronously by K users employing direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple access (DS/SSMA) on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The general structure of these detectors consists of a bank of matched filters, a linear transformation that operates on the matched-filter outputs, and a set of threshold devices. The linear transformations are chosen to minimize either a mean-squared-error or a weighted-squared-error performance criterion. Each detector can be implemented using a tapped delay line. The number of computations performed per detected bit is linear in K in each case, and the resulting detectors are thus much simpler than the optimum detector. Under typical operating conditions, these detectors will perform much better than the conventional receiver and often nearly as well as the optimum detector