In this paper, a multi-antenna based receiver structure for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) system is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the excellent time resolution of a CDMA RAKE receiver and uses an antenna array beamforming structure to resolve multipath returns in both angular and time domains. A much higher diversity gain than that based only on the time domain diversity can be achieved. This work suggests a new space-time diversity paradigm, namely angular-time diversity, which differs from traditional Alamouti-type space-time coded schemes. The impairments caused by multipath and multiuser interference are analyzed. The performance of the proposed receiver in multipath fading channel is explicitly evaluated. An expression for uncoded system bit error probability is derived. Simulation results show the performance improvement in terms of BER due to the use of multi-antenna in the receiver, and the results illustrate that the multi-antenna based receiver works effectively in resolving multipaths in both angular and time domains to achieve performance improvement due to angular and time diversity gain provided by the multi-antenna system.
