Active interference suppression in CDMA overlay systems

Communication networks involving the overlay of spread-spectrum systems on narrower band services are of increasing interest as a means of producing greater efficiencies and flexibility in the use of the radio spectrum. Although spread-spectrum systems enjoy a natural immunity to interference from narrowband sources, their performance in the presence of such interference can be significantly enhanced by active suppression techniques. The study of this problem has elicited a very rich body of methodology, which has progressed over nearly 25 years from some of the simplest signal processing paradigms to some of the most advanced. This paper provides an overview of a number of these techniques, most of which have been developed over the past decade. In particular, a progression of techniques is described, in which successively more information about the spread-spectrum signal and interference is used to make improvements on the interference suppression capability via more advanced signal processing methods. These include linear predictive methods that make use of the spectral properties of the spread-spectrum and narrowband signals, nonlinear predictive methods that make use of the spectra and first-order probability distribution of these signals, linear code-aided methods that make use of the spreading codes of the signals of interest and the second-order statistics of the narrowband interference, and finally, a maximum-likelihood code-aided technique that makes use of essentially all that is known about the useful signals and interference. Performance comparisons show that moving up this progression of improved modeling is rewarded with performance gains that can be quite significant.