Linear MMSE space-time equalizer for MIMO multicode CDMA systems

We propose an enhanced chip-level linear space-time (ST) equalizer for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multicode code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. In the MIMO multicode CDMA systems, the reuse of the same spreading codes in different transmit antennas significantly degrades the equalization performance if the ST equalizer uses a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) weighting vector that minimizes the mean-squared error of the equalizer output chip sequence. As the CDMA despreader concatenated to an ST equalizer distorts interstream interference components differently from multipath interference and background noise components, the chip-level MMSE weighting vector usually steers in suboptimal directions in the signal space. Therefore, we propose a new MMSE weighting vector that takes the despreading effect into account in this paper. Simulation results show a substantial performance improvement through the new weighting vector