Space-time coding-assisted double-spread RAKE receiver-based CDMA for dispersive Rayleigh fading environments

We propose a novel space-time coding-assisted double-spread RAKE receiver (STC-DS-RR) based CDMA scheme for downlink (base to mobile) transmissions over dispersive Rayleigh fading channels. The STC-DS-RR scheme invokes turbo convolutional (TC) channel coding and space-time block coding (STBC) for achieving both time and space diversity gains in addition to the path diversity gain provided by the dispersive Rayleigh fading environments. The double-spreading mechanism of the STC-DS-RR scheme is capable of detecting the wanted user´s channel-impaired wideband signals with the aid of a low-complexity RAKE receiver, without resorting to complex multi-user detection. The performance of the proposed scheme was investigated using quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK), when communicating over dispersive channels. It was shown that the wideband scheme advocated is capable of achieving E_b/N₀ gains up to 35 dB in comparison to an uncoded narrowband single-transmitter scheme.