Serial acquisition of DS-CDMA signals in multipath fading mobile channels

This paper compares the mean acquisition time (MAT) performance of two serial search acquisition schemes over frequency-selective multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Both the conventional cell-by-cell detection and the novel joint two-cell detection are characterized. In contrast to the majority of published results considering only one correct timing state ( 1 cell) in the uncertainty region of the pseudonoise (PN) sequence, this paper analyzes the MAT performance of the serial search acquisition schemes with multiple timing states in the uncertainty region. The MAT performance comparison between the conventional cell-by-cell detection and the joint two-cell detection shows that the latter can achieve an improved acquisition performance at almost the same complexity.