Iterative low-complexity receiver for the UMTS downlink

Abstract

In this paper, an iterative low-complexity receiver is proposed for Code Division Multiple Access (cdma) systems with small spreading factors. Theumts (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) radio interface based oncdma has been designed to offer a wide range of data rates using variable spreading factors. High data rate services are obtained by using small spreading factors. For such services, the spreading sequences have bad autocor-relation properties causing the degradation of the Rake receiver performance because of the InterSymbol Interference (isi). In order to improve the receiver performance, we propose to add a Decision Feedback Sequence Estimation (dfse) equalizer at the Rake receiver output. Thedfse is a low complexity equalizer which is able to take into accounta priori probability ratios and to deliver a posteriori probability ratios on bits in order to exchange soft information with the channel decoder, so that the proposed receiver benefits from the turbo-processing gains. Channel estimation is also treated in an iterative fashion. The complete receiver is well suited to theumts downlink system as it drastically reduces theisi while keeping a reasonable computational complexity.