A generalization of the Rake receiver performance

We generalize the theoretical expression of the Rake receiver performance by considering arbitrary numbers of Rake fingers, the path correlation and the imperfections of the channel estimator (error and bias). Just like the terminal complexity and consumption, the performance of the terminal depends narrowly on the number of Rake fingers. Removing the channel estimation bias can considerably improve the Rake receiver performance when the paths are spaced by less than a one chip period. The study shows that, in the presence of path correlation, the perfect channel estimation does not give necessarily the best performance.