Patent ID: 7359399

Claim:
A path-protection method for a CDMA reception apparatus, characterized by comprising a finger path timing generating step of obtaining correlation value levels while shifting a despreading timing of reception data, searching for optimal reception timings, and generating a plurality of finger path timings as reception timings at which reception data should be received, a detection step of despreading respective paths at the reception timings designated by the finger path timings, performing symbol synchronization, and obtaining a plurality of finger outputs, a RAKE combining step of adding and in-phase combining the plurality of finger outputs to obtain RAKE combined data; and a decoding step of decoding the RAKE combined data to obtain decoded data, wherein in the finger path timing generating step, backward protection is performed such that a reception timing which is a path detected for a first time is protected as a path in a backward protection state instead of immediately being set as a path in a synchronous state, and is determined as a path in the synchronous state only after the path is kept detected at the same reception timings as a designated backward protection stage count, forward protection is performed such that when a path detected by previous processing cannot be detected by current processing, the path is protected as a path in a forward protection state instead of immediately being deleted and setting an idle state, and is deleted from protection paths only after the path cannot be consecutively detected by the number of times equal to a designated forward protection stage count, and in the finger path timing generating step, of protection paths protected as paths in the forward protection state, at least a protection path with a lowest level is deleted, and at least a path having a highest level among currently detected paths is registered as a protection path in a deleted portion.