Time-deskew buffer design for MC-CDMA rake receiver

In the conventional rake receiver structure, each finger has its own time-deskew buffer that aligns the demodulated symbol data to the same timing reference in order to combine symbols. The number and size of the buffers are significantly increased in the MC-CDMA system, which adopts multiple carriers and small spreading gain for a higher rate in data services. To decrease the number of buffers, a new model of time-deskew buffers is proposed using the precombining technique. The architecture reduces hardware complexity by about 65% compared with the conventional one.