Node having a multi-user rake receiver for use in a cooperative broadcast multi-hop network that employs broadcast flood routing and multi-hop transmission with cooperative beamforming

A node configured to communicate in a cooperative broadcast multi-hop network that employs broadcast flood routing and multi-hop transmission using a direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) waveform, the node comprising:

• one or more antennas each being configured to receive a plurality of DSSS signals, wherein the plurality of DSSS signals include transmissions that are directly received from other nodes and multi-path components of those transmissions;
• and
• a waveform module coupled to the one or more antennas and having a receiver processing chain comprising:
• a multi-user RAKE receiver configured to:
• receive a plurality of transmissions directly received from the other nodes and multipath components of transmissions received from the other nodes, the multi-user RAKE receiver comprising:
• correlator blocks for each of the plurality of nodes, wherein each correlator block performs correlation for that particular node to determine channel-multipath correlations and generate one or more candidate fingers for that particular node;
• and
• a finger selection module configured to receive the candidate fingers output from each correlator block and to select a subset of the candidate fingers having sufficient correlation for further processing;
• a combiner module configured to:
• combine aligned symbols for the subset of candidate fingers on a per channel basis to generate a soft decision across each of a plurality of channels, and combine the soft decisions into a joint soft decision that comprises a coherently constructed signal that includes a coherently combined vector of chips of information from each of the plurality of channels;
• and
• a data despreader module configured to:
• despread the chips of information from each of the plurality of channels to generate demodulated data symbols that are converted into data soft-decision bits.