In non-cooperative scenarios, the spreading sequences or waveforms of the direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) signals is unknown to the receiver. This paper focuses on addressing the problem of blind estimation of the spreading waveform under multipath channels. In the scenario of direct signal path transmission, the spreading sequences can be directly obtained based on the estimated spreading waveforms. However, in the presence of multipath channels, the spreading waveform becomes the convolution of the spreading sequence and channel response, thus deconvolution should also be performed after estimating the spreading waveforms. In order to perform blind despreading and deconvolution of asynchronous multiuser DSSS signals under multipath channels, the authors propose to exploit the finite symbol characteristics of information and spreading sequences and then the iterative least square with projection method is adopted. Besides, the Cramer-Rao bound of spreading waveforms is derived in such a circumstance as a performance benchmark. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via simulation experiments.

In this paper, a tensor-based approach to blind despreading of long-code multiuser DSSS signals is proposed. We aim to generalize the tensor-based methods originally developed for blind separation of short-code multiuser DSSS signals to long-code cases. Firstly, we model the intercepted long-code multiuser DSSS signals with an antenna-array receiver as a three-order tensor with missing values, and then, the blind separation problem can be formulated as a canonical or parallel factor (CANDECOMP/PARAFAC) decomposition problem of the missing-data tensor, which can be solved using optimum methods. Secondly, a constrained Cramér–Rao Bound (CRB) is also derived to provide a performance benchmark for the proposed approach. Simulation results verify the feasibility of our proposed approach in the case of low signal-to-noise (SNR) conditions.