An efficient code-timing estimator for receiver diversity DS-CDMA systems

We propose an efficient algorithm for estimating the code-timing of DS-CDMA (direct-sequence code-division multiple-access) systems that consist of an arbitrary antenna array at the receiver and work in a flat fading and near-far environment. The algorithm is an asymptotic (for a large number of data samples) maximum likelihood estimator that is derived by modeling the known training sequence as the desired signal and all other signals including the interfering signals and the additive noise as unknown colored Gaussian noise. The algorithm does not require the search over a parameter space and the code-timing is obtained by rooting a second-order polynomial, which is computationally very efficient. Simulation results show that the algorithm is quite robust against the near-far problem and channel fading. It requires a shorter training sequence than the single antenna based estimators.