Root-MUSIC based joint identification and timing estimation of asynchronous CDMA system over Rayleigh fading channel

An efficient algorithm is proposed to identify the active users and extract their respective timing information in an asynchronous direct-sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) communication system over a Rayleigh fading channel. The joint identification and timing estimation algorithm is derived by performing a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) on the observation vector and exploiting the uniqueness and nullity characteristics of the root-MUSIC test polynomial. The root-MUSIC based algorithm is shown to be asymptotically near-far resistant. Moreover, compared to the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) or maximum likelihood (ML) based multiuser timing estimator, the complexity is greatly reduced by separating the multi-dimensional optimization problem into several polynomial rooting problems. The analytical results reveal that under the uncorrelated Rayleigh fading model, the root-MUSIC timing estimator tends to achieve the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) at interesting signature sequence length and user's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).