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Grouped Rake Finger Management Principle for
Wideband CDMA
Benny N.Vejlgaard*, Preben Mogensen**, Jasper Bailum Knudsen"
*Bosch Telecom Danmark, Industrivej 30, DK-9490 Pandrup
**Aalborg University, Fr. Bajersvej 7A, DK-9220 Aalborg 0
E-mail: Benny.Vejlgaard@dk.bosch.com
Abstract - -4 Rake finger allocation algorithm
for direct-sequence spread-spectrum systems is pre-
sented and analyzed. The Rake finger allocation
method is based on grouped Rake finger assignment.
The detected code phases with greatest power are
assigned a group of Rake fingers with equal spacing
around the detected code phase. Allocating the Rake
fingers with spacing less than one chip period can re-
duce overhead for delay tracking. The grouped Rake
finger allocation principle is compared to single Rake
finger allocation. Allocating three Rake fingers with
T,f 2 spacing gives a 0.2-0.4 dB gain compared to sin-
gle Rake finger assignment with the same number of
Rake and tracking fingers.
I. Introduction
After code phase acquisition has been estab-
lished the Rake finger must be associated with
the detected code phase. The detected code
phase corresponds to a multi-path delay in the
radio channel. The delays of the channel multi-
paths are none stationary, therefore it is nec-
essary to continuously look for new multi-path
components in the channel.
The multi-paths are then allocated to the Rake
receiver for demodulation. This coarse synchro-
nization for each Rake finger must be fine syn-
chronized by the tracking mechanism in the re-
ceiver. The multi-paths allocated to the Rake
receiver will disappear as the mobile moves and
the delay profile of the channel changes. These
fingers are then de-allocated from the Rake re-
ceiver and new multi-paths can be allocated from
the searching mechanism. The inter working be-
tween searching and the Rake receiver is shown
in figure 1.
The multi-paths are detected by the code phase
acquisition device and the strongest multi-paths
are each allocated a Rake finger. Rake fingers
can be grouped as multi-paths appear and a sin-
gle tracking mechanism can be shared among the
Rake fingers. Rake fingers can also be allocated
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Allocate -
Acquisition/ Tracking
De-allocate
u m
Searching Rake Receiver
Re-allocate
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the acquisition and receiver
mechanism.
in groups. This paper analyzes the performance
of a Rake receiver with Rake fingers being allo-
cated in groups.
The organization of the paper is the following.
The channel model used for evaluating the Rake
finger management is described in section 11.
Traditional Rake finger allocation is described
in section 111. The proposed grouped Rake fin-
ger allocation method is analyzed in section IV.
The performance of the two allocation scheme is
compared in section V. Concluding remarks are
given in section VI.
11. Radio Channel Measurements
It is desirable to test the acquisition and
Rake finger management algorithms in a real
transceiver. Since a real time UMTS test-bed
was unavailable in the project, measurement
data can be used to simulate receiver perfor-
mance off-line. Such measurement data were
available from CPK at Aalborg University [l].
The measurements were performed in Aarhus,
Denmark and in Stockholm, Sweden. The sys-
tem was designed for uplink transmission. How-
ever, the same channel properties can be ap-
plied to the downlink channel. The transmit-
ter is placed in the measurement vehicle. The
measurement vehicle follows a given path with a
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speed of approximately 10 m/s while the mea-
surements are recorded.
Channel sounding is used to estimate the im-
pulse response of the radio channel. The sound-
ing signal u ( t ) is a maximum length sequence
of length 127 chips. The testbed operates at a
carrier frequency of 1.8 GHz and the chip rate
equals l/Tc = 4.096 Mcps. Thus, the band-
width of the sounding signal is comparable to
the bandwidth used in UMTS. The received sig-
nal at the output of the antenna is sampled ev-
ery Ts = T,/2 = 122 ns and recorded for fur-
ther off-line processing. The impulse response of
the radio channel is recorded for approximately
15 ps every 5 ms. The impulse responses are
up-sampled by a factor of three to be used for
the channel model for each each downlink slot
of length 666 ps. This gives a mobile speed ap-
proximately of 25 m/s.
A . Channel RMS Delay Spread
The delay spread is a common measure of the
multi-path spread in the channel. In order to get
a realistic evaluation of the measurements rms
delay spread, it is necessary to calculate it over a
period in which the fast fading can be averaged.
About 30 wavelengths give a realistic measure
of the channel delay profile. The noise floor has
- Stockholm
08
07
Fig. 2. Cumulative density function of the channel
delay spread measured in Aarhus and Stockholm.
been estimated from recorded samples prior to
the impulse response. The analysis uses -20 dB
noise floor and any power below that threshold is
regarded as zero. The channel rms delay spread
is shown in figure 2. The median channel rms
delay spread for Aarhus and Stockholm is 1.3 ps
and 2 ps respectively.
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B. Channel Excess Delay
The channel excess delay or the length of the
channel impulse response for power exceeding a
given power threshold is used to determine the
scanning interval or the uncertainty region of
the code phases. The same measurements from
Aarhus and Stockholm are used to analyze the
channel excess delay. The channel excess delay
is shown in figure 3. Acquiring 90% of the re-
01 __
-
Stockholm lh -10 dB
Stockholm. th = -20 dB
Aarhus. th ii - i o dB
Aarhus. th = -20 dB
-0 5 to
Channel Excess delay b s ]
Fig. 3. Cumulative density function of the channel
excess delay measured in Aarhus and Stockholm.
ceived power, the delay interval or excess delay
is 6 p s and 7.5 p s for Aarhus and Stockholm re-
spectively with a threshold of -10 dB. The excess
delay will increase to 7 ps and 8 ps for Aarhus an
Stockholm respectively by lowering the thresh-
old to -15 dB. In the Rake receiver multi-paths
with power less than -10 to -15 dB dB com-
pared to the main path will not increase per-
formance significantly. Therefore, allocating an
uncertainty region of 10 ps for each base station
transmitting to the mobile will assure that all
multi-paths can be detected by the code phase
acquisition device.
111. Single Rake Finger Allocation
The finger allocation algorithm is the connection
between the Rake receiver and the search fingers.
After the search fingers find the strongest multi-
path components they have to be allocated to
the Rake receiver for demodulation. The multi-
path components change as the mobile station
moves around and the current multi-path com-
ponents in the Rake receiver have to be removed
or de-allocated. The mechanism of allocating
multi-paths to and from the Rake receiver is de-
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scribed in the following. The measured impulse response from Aarhus

and Stockholm is used to find the required num-
A. Finger Allocation ber of rake fingers. The cumulative density func-
Once the searcher has identified the channel im- tion of the number of Rake fingers required to
pulse response, the strongest multi-paths are ensure 70-90% of the total received signal power
used by the Rake receiver for demodulation. The is shown in figure 5. A threshold of -10 dB is
task for the Rake finger allocation algorithm is
to optimize the SNR in the Rake finger com-
bining. This is done by allocating the multi-
paths components from the code phase acqui-
sition to active Rake fingers. This process of
allocating the fingers from the searcher to the
Rake fingers is a continuous task in order to
make sure that new multi-paths are allocated to
the Rake receiver. The allocation of Rake fin-
gers is shown in figure 4. All the tap coefficients

Searcher
priority list "0 2 4 6 B 10 12 14 16 18 20
Number of Rake fingers required
Path 11 Next
Rake allocation
Fig. 5 . Cumulative density function of the number
Finger 17
of Rake fingers needed to ensure 70-90% of the
Finger 13 Finaer I n
Path 16 Finger /4
received power as indicated in the plot.
Path 17 Finger /6
used to distinguish the impulses from noise, thus
Fig. 4. An example of allocating Rake fingers to all samples of the impulse response with power
measured multi-path components. less that -10 dB of the strongest peak. The total
power is calculated as the sum of all power peaks
are ordered from largest power to the lowest in in the impulse response
a searcher priority list. This is the output from
the code phase acquisition. The strongest multi-
path from the searcher is allocated to available
Rake fingers. Even though a Rake finger is allo- The strongest peaks are identified, and the cu-
cated to a multi-path component, it may not be mulative sum of these peak powers are calculated
included in the Rake combining due to fading. as n
This will ensure better performance if the path
with low instantaneously SNR is excluded in the
Rake finger combining.
where P, are the strongest power peaks in de-
B. Number of Rake fingers scending order. The distribution of the receiver
power utilized is the ratio
The number of Rake fingers is very important
for an implementation of the Rake receiver. The Pn
Pused =- (3)
baseband chip should be designed with a number Ptotal '
of Rake fingers suitable for all environments. For which is shown in figure 5 for Pus& between 70%
low dispersive environments the unused Rake and 90% of the total received power.
fingers should be turned off. The requirement to The typical urban environment in Aarhus re-
the number of Rake fingers has been analyzed quires 4 to 6 Rake fingers depending on the
in [2] for three different environments in Ade- power ratio used in the comparison. This is in
laide, Melbourne, and Sydney in Australia. It good agreement with results in [2]. However for
was found that in a system with chip rate 4 Mcps the bad urban environment in Stockholm 10 to
four Rake fingers would utilize 80% of the total 15 Rake fingers is more realistic for optimum per-
received power in 95% of all cases. formance.

02000 IEEE.
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IV. Grouped Rake Finger Allocation
A Rake receiver consists of a bank of correlators.
Each of the correlators is used to detect sepa-
rately one of the L strongest multi-path compo-
nents. Each of the decorrelated multi-paths is
combined into one signal before detection. For
the operation of the Rake receiver it is neces-
sary to identify and track the major multi-path
components as well as to estimate their rela-
tive delays, amplitudes, and phases. The first
Rake receiver described in 1958 by Price and
Green [3] used a fixed number of Rake fingers
each equally separated with T, seconds equal to
the chip interval. The usability ofthis finger al-
location method works well for low bandwidths
where a few Rake fingers will cover large excess
delays. However, for high chip rates and systems
receiving from multiple base station it may not
be flexible enough to have all the Rake fingers
separated by T, seconds.
In todays mobile communication, a searcher
looks for each individual multi-path component
and then allocates a single Rake finger, each with
a tracking mechanism [4]. This finger alloca-
tion scheme works well for mobile communica-
tion systems receiving from multiple base sta-
tion simultaneously. The channel impulse re-
sponses obtained from Aarhus and Stockholm
have been analyzed for the distribution of the
multi-path components and which Rake finger
allocation method to chose. The cumulative den-
sity function for the width of consecutive impulse
response taps in both Aarhus and Stockholm is
shown in figure 6. It can be seen that the width
1
09
08
0 05 1 15 2 25 3 35
Wdm of consecultve impulse response laps Ips]
4 45
Fig. 6. Cumulative density function of the width of
consecutive impulse response taps measured in
Aarhus and Stockholm.
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of consecutive taps is in the order of 0.5 - 1.0 ps
corresponding to 2 - 4 chip periods. The chip
rate of UNITS is so high that often more than one
Rake finger is necessary to capture the energy
from the main impulse response tap. By allo-
cating multiple Rake finger with chip separation
gives a great overhead for tracking. It is there-
fore suggested to allocate some of the Rake fin-
gers group wise with a single tracking mechanism
associated with the group of Rake fingers. The
original method suggested by Price and Green
would require a high number of Rake fingers in
order to capture all the power from a time dis-
persive channel including including signal power
from multiple base station in soft handoff.
This method splits the received channel impulse
response into a few separate bins. Each bin is as-
signed a set of Rake fingers and a single tracking
mechanism. An example of the grouped Rake
finger assignment is shown in figure 7. Each
Fig. 7. Grouped Rake finger assignment technique.
Rake finger group has assigned a single tracking
mechanism. The number of Rake fingers in each
group depends on the instantaneous radio chan-
nel impulse response. The allocation of Rake
fingers in groups can be done in many differ-
ent ways depending on the available number of
Rake and tracking fingers. The main advantage
of allocating Rake fingers in groups is to reduce
the overhead for tracking. The following sections
will analyze different allocation methods based
on the grouped Rake finger concept.
For simplicity the analyzed grouped Rake finger
allocation algorithm uses equal size Rake finger
groups. This gives an over estimate of the re-
quired number of Rake fingers to be used in this
scenario. Using a separation between Rake fin-
gers less than the chip period, T, reduces the
overhead for tracking fingers. By allocating the
Rake fingers in groups of three spaced less than
5 Tc the two outer Rake fingers can be used for
delay tracking as well as descrambling. This is
the same architecture as the ideal Early-late gate
tracker with the exception that all three fingers
are used in the Rake combining. Results com-
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paring the single Rake finger allocation and the
grouped Rake finger allocation will be shown.
V. Receiver Performance
The performance of the Rake receiver is highly
dependent on detection and allocation of multi-
paths to the Rake fingers. This section analyzes
the raw BER performance for the two measured
channel profiles and three different Rake finger
allocation methods. The three Rake finger al-
location methods are single Rake finger alloca-
tion, grouped Rake finger allocation, and a ref-
erence allocation. The BER performance for the
10 0
e
; lo-,
U
-2
EWNO
Fig. 8. BER performance of the measured typical
urban channel profile from Aarhus.
Aarhus channel data is shown in figure 8. The
Rake receiver used for the Aarhus channel data
uses a sampling rate of Tc/2with 5 Rake fingers
and 5 tracking fingers for the single Rake finger
allocation algorithm. The grouped Rake finger
algorithm uses 9 Rake fingers without any over-
head for tracking. It can be seen that there is a
0.2 dB gain at a BER of 10% using the grouped
Rake finger allocation algorithm.
The BER performance is also estimated for the
bad urban channel data in the Stockholm chan-
nel data as shown in figure 9. The Rake receiver
used for the Stockholm channel data uses 10
Rake fingers and 10 tracking fingers for the single
Rake finger allocation algorithm. The grouped
Rake finger algorithm uses 18 Rake fingers. The
grouped Rake finger allocation algorithm gives a
0.4 dB gain at a BER of 10%.
VI. Conclusion
Rake Finger management deals with allocating
the correct code phases to the available Rake fin-
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ia'
w
U
2 10.'
U
Fig. 9. BER performance of the measured bad urban
channel profile from Stockholm.
gers. Two different allocating schemes are tested
using real channel measurement data from a typ-
ical urban environment and a bad urban environ-
ment. In both measurements the delay spreads
are less than 2.5 ps and the uncertainty region is
less than 10 ps for each base station transmitting
to the mobile station.
The grouped Rake finger allocation with three
fingers in each group and Tc/2 spacing gives a
performance increase of 0.2-0.4 dB compared to
the single rake finger allocation depending on the
Radio channel, which makes it recommendable
for Rake finger allocation.
The typical urban environment in Aarhus re-
quires 4 to 6 Rake fingers depending on the
power ratio used in the comparison. However
for the bad urban environment in Stockholm 10
to 15 Rake fingers is more realistic for optimum
performance.
References
Klaus I. Pedersen, Preben E. Mogensen, and
Bernard H. Fleury. A Stochastic Model of the Tempo-
ral and Azimuthal Dispersion seen a t the Base Station
in Outdoor Propagation Environments. IEEE Trans-
action on Vehicular Technology.
Gregory T. Martin and Michael Faulkner. 1.9 GHz
Measurement-based Analysis of Diversity Power ver-
sus the Number of RAKE Receiver Tines at Various
System Bandwidths. Personal Indoor Mobile Radio
Conference Proceedings, Finland:1096-1073, Septem-
ber 1997.
R. Price and P. E. Green. A Communication Tech-
nique for Multipath Channels. Proceedings of the IRE,
Vol. 46:555-570, 1958.
Andrew J. Viterbi. Principles of Spread Spectrum
Communications. Addison-Wesley Publishing Com-
pany, 1995.
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