Upper bounding the performance of a RAKE receiver operating with imperfect phase estimates

As larger diversity and coding gains are introduced into spread spectrum systems to mitigate the effects of multipath fading and thermal noise, system performance is increasingly being limited by the channel estimation error. In order to allocate system resources to maximize system performance, performance measures incorporating the effects of estimation errors are needed. An upper bound on an approximation to the probability of bit error for a RAKE receiver operating with imperfect phase estimates is presented along with an example of its use in allocating transmit energy between data and estimation symbols in a packet-based system.