Space-time signal processing of spread spectrum communication systems in colored interference

Realizable wireless communication systems encounter noise, interference, and channel induced multiplicative fading that can corrupt the desired signal of interest and reduce system capacity. Antenna array combining algorithms that combat channel induced fading and suppress interference are introduced and evaluated in this dissertation to increase the signal quality and capacity of spread spectrum (SS) wireless communication systems.; The statistical gain differences between two common spatial combining algorithms: Optimal Combining (OC) and Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) are initially analyzed using a gain ratio method. The ratio of the OC to MRC receive carrier-to-interference plus noise ratio is evaluated for a flat Rayleigh fading communication system with multiple interferers. Interference suppression gains using OC vs. MRC are illustrated.; The gain ratio results are used to analyze the average data throughput and voice Erlang capacity for a multi-cell code division multiple access (CDMA) uplink. The impact of both scheduled and randomly arriving data users on the voice Erlangs is analyzed using a Lost Call Held user arrival model. Increased data throughput and voice Erlangs using OC vs. MRC are illustrated only at very large data user data rates.; Transmit pre-correction equalizer solutions are then studied for a time division multiplexed SS downlink (DL) wireless communication system. The OC pre-RAKE channel equalizer is derived from the linear space-time equalizer as a sub-optimal yet reduced complexity solution for the sparse channel with multi-path inter-chip-interference. The OC pre-RAKE is shown to outperform the standard MRC pre-RAKE using bit error rate (BER) simulations. A weight using the maximum of the OC pre-RAKE weights is also studied for the multi-user CDMA DL.; Finally, a multi-cell CDMA DL receive equalizer solution is analyzed. The typical single cell multi-antenna space-time (S-T) receive equalizer is not optimum for the receiver in multi-cell handoff as other cell transmit signals are not utilized in the equalizer solution. By recorrelating the other transmit cell signals at the DL receiver, a joint space-cover-time (S-C-T) linear equalizer method is defined incorporating all transmit cell signals (cover dimension). BER simulations illustrate that the S-C-T equalizer outperforms the per cell S-T equalizer solution in varying system conditions.