Location-Aided RAKE Receiver Finger Assignment

We propose and analyze a new technique for improving RAKE receivers for DS-CDMA systems that eliminates the loss due to incorrect finger assignment. Such loss occurs due to errors caused by the searcher in estimating the average power of multipaths. Our technique uses a mobile location indexed database of multipath delays and average powers obtained error-free through offline techniques. During a mobile call, the mobile location is used to look up the database and obtain error-free finger assignment information. We analyze the improvement due to such a "genie"-aided scheme on the performance of the RAKE receiver in terms of the SNR required to achieve a target BER and in terms of the system user capacity under a 4-path Rayleigh fading scenario.