On Modeling of a Mobile Multipath Fading Channel

Multipath fading is one of the major practical concerns in wireless communications. A multipath transmission takes place when a transmitted signal arrives at a receiver by two or more paths of different delay. Such multiple paths may be due to atmospheric reflection or refraction, or reflections from buildings or other objects. A multipath fading channel is usually modeled as a time-variant tapped delay system. RAKE receiver can be used to detect the signal from the multipath fading channel. However, the number of delay taps, the time delay of each path, and the tap weight for each delay path need to be determined. The objective of this thesis is to explore the possibility of using the advance signal processing algorithms to estimate the number of delays, the time delay of each path, and the tap weight for each delay path in multipath channels and to investigate the performance of the RAKE receiver based on chip rate channel estimates in a realistic mobile environment. Simulations show that the new approach outperforms the existing approaches.