Harmony Search Aided Iterative Channel Estimation, Multiuser Detection and Channel Decoding for DS-CDMA

A novel Multiuser Detection (MUD) scheme is proposed for DS-CDMA systems employing the so-called Harmony Search (HS) algorithm, which is a novel meta-heuristic optimisation method. We specifically design the HS aided MUD for the communications problem considered and apply it in an iterative joint Channel Estimation (CE), MUD and channel decoding framework. The simulation results demonstrate that a near-single-user performance can be achieved by the proposed algorithm while avoiding the excessive-complexity full-search-based optimum detection even in overloaded DS-CDMA systems. Moreover, the HS algorithm can be efficiently applied in the Expectation Maximisation (EM) based CE framework.