Timing-Free Blind Multiuser Detection for Multicarrier DS/CDMA Systems with Multiple Antennae

The problem of blind multiuser detection for an asynchronous multicarrier DS-CDMA system employing multiple transmit and receive antennae over a Rayleigh fading channel is considered in this paper. The solutions that we develop require prior knowledge of the spreading code of the user to be decoded only, while no further information either on the user to be decoded or on the other active users is required. Several combining rules for the observables at the output of each receive antenna are proposed and assessed, and the implications of the different options are studied in depth in terms of both detection performance and computational complexity. A closed form expression is also derived for the conditional error probability and a lower bound for the near-far resistance is provided. Results confirm that the proposed blind receivers can cope with both multiple access interference suppression and channel estimation at the price of a limited performance loss as compared to the ideal linear receivers which assume perfect channel state information.