The impact of timing errors on the performance of linear DS-CDMA receivers

In this paper, an asynchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) communication system operating over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is considered. In many applications, the near-far problem can be the limiting factor for the capacity of a DS-CDMA system. Several near-far resistan t receivers have, therefore, been proposed (e.g., the decorrelating receiver). These receivers assume perfect knowledge of the propagation delay from all users to the receiver. In practice, the delays are estimated and therefore subject to errors. The performance degradation these errors impose on linear detectors, especially the decorrelating detector, is the topic of this paper.