Receiver for use in a cooperative broadcast multi-hop network

Abstract

A receiver is provided that includes a multi-user RAKE receiver that can receive a plurality of transmissions directly received from a plurality of nodes of a cooperative broadcast multi-hop network and multipath components of those transmissions, a combiner module and a data despreader module. The multi-user RAKE receiver includes correlator blocks for each node and a finger selection module. Each correlator block generates one or more candidate fingers for that particular node. The finger selection module can select a subset of the candidate fingers having sufficient correlation for further processing. The combiner module can combine aligned symbols for the subset of candidate fingers to generate and combine soft decisions across each of a plurality of channels into a joint soft decision. The data despreader module can despread chips of information from each of the plurality of channels to generate demodulated data symbols that are converted into data soft-decision bits.