Adaptive antenna array receivers for spread-spectrum signals in non-Gaussian noise

We consider the problem of recovering a spread-spectrum (SS) signal in the presence of unknown highly correlated spread-spectrum interference and impulsive noise. In terms of basic system and signal model considerations, we assume availability of a narrowband adaptive antenna array that experiences additive white Gaussian noise in time and across elements, as well as impulsive disturbance with direction-of-arrival (DOA) that changes at the chip rate. The space-time receiver design developed in this work is characterized by the following attributes: (i) Adaptive interference suppression is pursued in the joint space-time domain. (ii) An adaptive parametric nonlinear front end offers effective suppression of impulsive disturbances at low computational cost. (iii) An adaptive auxiliary-vector linear filter postprocessor offers effective, low-complexity suppression of SS interferers and leads to superior bit-error-rate (BER) performance under rapid, short-data-record system adaptation. Numerical and simulation comparisons with plain and outlier resistant space-time minimum-variance-distortionless-response (MVDR) filtering procedures are included to illustrate and support the theoretical developments. (C) 2001 academic Press.