Performance of a RAKE demodulator with pre-decision multipath thresholding

The performance of a RAKE demodulator used for reception of spread-spectrum digital communications over multipath channels that coherently recombines path signal components to improve date transmission performance as a function of the threshold level is analyzed RAKE receiver performance is enhanced by thresholding the channel reference to select the principal multipath components for demodulation processing. Results evaluated for various error rates, multipath dispersion and demodulation parameters show that thresholding permits a reduction in required E_b/N₀ of up to 6 dB or more relative to a RAKE demodulator without thresholding. This performance gain is insensitive to the value of the threshold setting for communication media with multipath resolved by the spread-spectrum waveform correlator