An enhanced widely linear CDMA receiver with OQPSK modulation

This paper studies an enhanced widely linear (WL) receiver for direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems that employ aperiodic spreading sequences with offset quadrature phase-shift keying (OQPSK) modulation. The modulation scheme generates improper complex multiple-access interference (MAI) and necessitates the use of WL receivers. Focus is on bandlimited pulse shapes and the inherent cyclostationarity (CS) of the uncoded received signal. The enhanced WL receiver replaces the conventional chip-matched filter with new filters that exploit the CS of the received signal through frequency shifting. The proposed WL receiver is shown to outperform the classical strictly linear (SL) receiver when the interfering users are (quasi-)synchronous with respect to the user of interest. High-powered interfering users, that may exist to support high data rates, increase the performance improvement delivered by the WL receiver. Moreover, it is shown that MAI can become proper, either identically or asymptotically, when users are asynchronous and equally powered. This is despite the fact that individual interfering signals are improper. Numerical results demonstrate that the WL receiver can outperform the SL receiver by 1-3 dB under the examined scenarios with current CDMA standards settings. In asynchronous or quasi-synchronous transmission modes, performance gain of the WL receiver degrades unless the number of high-powered active users remains small. An example for implementation of the WL receiver is proposed and compared with that of the SL receiver when minimum-shift keying modulation, a special case of OQPSK, is used. The implementation is based on a fractionally spaced equalizer whose taps are updated by an adaptive algorithm. It is shown that the proposed structure is capable of delivering the maximum signal-to-noise ratio predicted by theory.