Reduced-Rank Chip-Level MMSE Equalization for the 3G CDMA Forward Link with Code-Multiplexed Pilot

This paper deals with synchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple access (CDMA) transmission using orthogonal channel codes in frequency selective multipath, motivated by the forward link in 3G CDMA systems. The chip-level minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimate of the (multiuser) synchronous sum signal transmitted by the base, followed by a correlate and sum, has been shown to perform very well in saturated systems compared to a Rake receiver. In this paper, we present the reduced-rank, chip-level MMSE estimation based on the multistage nested Wiener filter (MSNWF). We show that, for the case of a known channel, only a small number of stages of the MSNWF is needed to achieve near full-rank MSE performance over a practical single-to-noise ratio (SNR) range. This holds true even for an edge-of-cell scenario, where two base stations are contributing near equal-power signals, as well as for the single base station case. We then utilize the code-multiplexed pilot channel to train the MSNWF coefficients and show that adaptive MSNWF operating in a very low rank subspace performs slightly better than full-rank recursive least square (RLS) and significantly better than least mean square (LMS). An important advantage of the MSNWF is that it can be implemented in a lattice structure, which involves significantly less computation than RLS. We also present structured MMSE equalizers that exploit the estimate of the multipath arrival times and the underlying channel structure to project the data vector onto a much lower dimensional subspace. Specifically, due to the sparseness of high-speed CDMA multipath channels, the channel vector lies in the subspace spanned by a small number of columns of the pulse shaping filter convolution matrix. We demonstrate that the performance of these structured low-rank equalizers is much superior to unstructured equalizers in terms of convergence speed and error rates.