Space-time blind multiuser detection for multirate DS/CDMA signals

Multiuser detection for multirate direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS/CDMA) has been an active area of research. For example, nonblind low-rate (LR) and high-rate (HR) decorrelators have been proposed and analyzed in the literature for synchronous dual-rate systems with single receive antenna. Inspired by the subspace-based space-time (ST) blind linear detectors for synchronous single-rate systems, this paper extends the existing results and proposes the subspace-based ST-LR and ST-HR blind linear detectors, i.e., blind decorrelators and blind minimum mean-squared error (mmse) detectors, for synchronous dual-rate DS/CDMA. It is shown that: 1) ST-LR blind linear detectors can support no less users than ST-HR blind linear detectors as long as the desired spatial signature is identifiable (assuming that all the other system parameters are the same) and 2) the bit-error rate performance of ST-LR blind decorrelator is not inferior to that of its HR counterpart. The above conclusions are generalized to synchronous multirate systems. The extension to asynchronous systems is also described. Finally, the two-stage ST dual-rate blind detectors, which combine the adaptive purely temporal dual-rate blind mmse detectors with the nonadaptive beamformer, are presented.