Multiuser Detection for DS-CDMA Systems on Nakagami-0.5 Fading Channels with Impulsive Noise

Recent attention has been given to Nakagami-0.5 fading channel as a special case of Nakagami-m fading channel with m = 0.5 and as a worst-case (severe) fading scenario. This paper presents a study on the performance analysis of a robust multiuser detector for direct sequencecode division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems including maximal ratio combining (MRC) receive diversity. A new M-estimator, which performs well in the heavy-tailed impulsive noise, proposed to robustify the detector is also studied and analyzed by deriving average probability of error over a single path Nakagami-0.5 fading channel. Numerical results show the efficacy of the proposed Mestimator, under severe fading conditions of Nakagami-m channel, in comparison with linear decorrelating detector, the Huber and the Hampel estimator based detectors.