Neural network techniques for adaptive multiuser demodulation

Adaptive methods for performing multiuser demodulation in a direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS/SSMA) communication environment are investigated. In this scenario, the noise is characterized as being the sum of the interfering users' signals and additive Gaussian noise. The optimal receiver for DS/SSMA systems has a complexity that is exponential in the number of users. This prohibitive complexity has spawned the area of research on suboptimal receivers with moderate complexity. Adaptive algorithms for detection allow for reception when the communication environment is either unknown or changing. Motivated by previous work with radial basis functions (RBF's) for performing equalization, RBF networks that operate with knowledge of only a subset of the system parameters are studied. Although this form of detection has been previously studied (group detection) when the system parameters are known, in this work, neural network techniques are employed to adaptively determine unknown system parameters. This approach is further bolstered by the fact that the optimal detector in the synchronous case can be implemented by a RBF network when all of the system parameters are known. The RBF network's performance (with estimated parameters) is compared with the optimal synchronous detector, the decorrelating detector and the single layer perceptron detector. Clustering techniques and adaptive least mean squares methods are investigated to determine the unknown system parameters. This work shows that the adaptive radial basis function network attains near optimal performance and is robust in realistic communication environments. >