Robust adaptive recovery of spread-spectrum signals with short data records

The problem under consideration is the adaptive reception of a multipath di rect-sequence spread-spectrum (SS) signal in the presence of unknown correl ated SS interference and additive impulsive noise. An SS receiver structure is proposed that consists of a vector of adaptive chip-based Hampel nonlin earities followed by an adaptive auxiliary-vector linear tap-weight filter. The nonlinear receiver front-end adapts itself to the unknown prevailing n oise environment providing robust performance over a wide range of underlyi ng noise distributions. The adaptive auxiliary-vector linear tap-weight fil ter allows rapid SS interference suppression with a limited data record, Nu merical and simulation studies under finite-data-record system adaptation s how significant improvement in bit-error-rate performance over the conventi onal linear minimum-variance-distortionless-response (MVDR) SS receiver or conventional MVDR filtering preceded by vector adaptive chip-based nonlinea r processing.