Blind code-timing estimation for CDMA systems with bandlimited chip waveforms in multipath fading channels

In this paper, we present a blind code-timing estimator for asynchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems that use bandlimited chip waveforms. The proposed estimator first converts the received signal to the frequency domain, followed by a frequency deconvolution to remove the convolving chip waveform, and then calculates the code-timing estimate from the output of a narrowband filter with a sweeping center frequency, which is designed to suppress the overall interference in the frequency domain. The proposed estimator is near-far resistant, and can deal with time- and frequency-selective channel fading. It uses only the spreading code of the desired user, and can be adaptively implemented for both code acquisition and tracking. We also derive an unconditional Cramér - Rao bound (CRB) that is not conditioned on the fading coefficients or the information symbols. It is a more suitable lower bound than a conditional CRB for blind code-timing estimators which do not assume knowledge of the channel or information symbols. We present numerical examples to evaluate and compare the proposed and several other code-timing estimators for bandlimited CDMA systems.