Rapid acquisition of PN signals for DS/SS systems employing a phase estimator

Abstract

We propose a scheme for rapid acquisition of PN signals for direct-sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) CDMA systems by estimating the phase of the incoming PN signal with the use of an auxiliary signal. The phase of the incoming PN signal is estimated using the cross-correlation properties between the PN signal and the auxiliary signal. The estimated phase is used to initialize the phase of the local PN code generator. A conventional serial search scheme is used to detect phase alignment. The performance of the proposed acquisition scheme is analytically evaluated in terms of the mean acquisition time. Results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the acquisition time.