This paper considers the problem of realizing excellent performance of rapid acquisition in direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication systems. In this paper, we consider a scheme of digital matched filter (DMF) combined with soft decision function, which has potential capability of improving the characteristics of hard decision function by about 2dB in the environment of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and is capable of handling long PN codes by means of simple LSIs. Analysis is made on the performance in the environment of AWGN channel and results of experiments are provided. It is confirmed that the scheme provides attractive means for acquisition of direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals. Namely, soft decision DMF achieves rapid acquisition; the dwell time for soft decision DMF in the process of acquisition is half of that for hard decision DMF. In addition, it is shown that the correlator output signal produced by the acquisition circuit can also be used for the purpose of demodulation; excellent performance of bit error probability is experimentally observed.

This paper focuses on a multi-beam combining scheme for DS-CDMA systems, which has RAKE combiners in multiple overlapped beams, in order to increase the reverse link capacity of DS-CDMA. This scheme is a very attractive technique because the maximal ratio combining (MRC) is carried out in space and time domains. However, in a practical situation, since the terminals in own sector are not uniformly located, the interference levels in respective beams are different. Therefore, receivers at the base station do not achieve ideal combining. This paper proposes a multi-beam combining scheme for DS-CDMA systems using weighting factor based on interference level of each beam. A fast closed loop transmission power control (TPC) scheme for the multi-beam combining system is also proposed. It is confirmed by computer simulation that the proposed scheme has excellent performance in the reverse link even if terminals in own sector are not uniformly located.