Subspace Smoothing for Direction of Arrival Estimation in DS-CDMA Systems

In this paper a subspace processing method is introduced that can be used for direction of arrival estimation of coherent signals in an asynchronous DS-CDMA system. Conventional methods of direction of arrival estimation are not directly applicable to the case of multiple coherent signals that impinge on an antenna array from different directions. Some preprocessing is essential prior to estimation in this case. The proposed method exploits the spreading code and the path delays of the desired user to eliminate the contribution of undesired paths in the signal subspace. To this end, the signal subspace is mapped to a new subspace which contains the spatial-temporal signature of the desired signal. Once the desired subspace is created, conventional methods such as MUSIC and ESPRIT can be employed to estimate the desired directions of arrival. It is proved that the obtained direction of arrival estimator, based on the proposed method, is consistent. Also, the estimation performance is evaluated by comparing the proposed method with conventional estimation methods.