Robust adaptive recovery of spread-spectrum signals with short data records

The problem under consideration is the adaptive reception of a multipath direct-sequence spread-spectrum (SS) signal in the presence of unknown correlated SS interference and additive impulsive noise. An SS receiver structure is proposed that consists of a vector of adaptive chip-based Hampel nonlinearities followed by an adaptive auxiliary-vector linear tap-weight filter. The nonlinear receiver front end adapts itself to the unknown prevailing noise environment providing robust performance over a wide range of underlying noise distributions. The adaptive auxiliary-vector linear tap-weight filter allows rapid SS interference suppression with a limited data record. Numerical and simulation studies under finite-data-record system adaptation show significant improvement in bit-error-rate performance over the conventional linear minimum variance-distortionless-response (MVDR) SS receiver or conventional MVDR filtering preceded by vector adaptive chip-based nonlinear processing.