Estimation of directions of arrival of multipath signals in CDMA systems

In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for estimating the directions of arrival (DOA's) of multipath signals received from multiple users on the uplink of a code-division multiple-access system. The correlation matrices of the received signal before and after code-matched filtering are used to provide unique estimates even when the number of required DOA's exceeds the number of antenna array elements. This scenario is well known to cause conventional direction-finding algorithms (such as MUSIC) to fail. Both intersymbol interference (ISI) and multiple-access interference (MAI) are modeled exactly, and so the algorithm performs much better than those which model ISI and MAI as Gaussian noise.