Multiuser Receiver for DS-CDMA Signals in Multipath Channels: An Enhanced Multisurface Method

This paper deals with the problem of multiuser detection in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems in multipath environments. The existing multiuser detectors can be divided into two categories: 1) low-complexity poor-performance linear detectors and 2) high-complexity good-performance nonlinear detectors. In particular, in channels where the orthogonality of the code sequences is destroyed by multipath, detectors with linear complexity perform much worse than the nonlinear detectors. In this paper, we propose an enhanced multisurface method (EMSM) for multiuser detection in multipath channels. EMSM is an intermediate piecewise linear detection scheme with a run-time complexity linear in the number of users. Its bit error rate performance is compared with existing linear detectors, a nonlinear radial basis function detector trained by the new support vector learning algorithm, and Verdu´s optimal detector. Simulations in multipath channels, for both synchronous and asynchronous cases, indicate that it always outperforms all other linear detectors, performing nearly as well as nonlinear detectors