An Improved Cell Search with SIC Detection for 3GPP LTE System

3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution) has primary and secondary synchronization channels for initial cell search. P-SCH (Primary Synchronization Channel) is used to get the slot timing and cell group and S-SCH (Secondary Synchronization Channel) is used to acquire the frame boundary and cell identity (Cell ID). The need for improved cell search performance is gradually increased since most LTE cells need to be deployed with synchronous timing alignment each other to provide MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service) effectively as well as to improve successful handover rate. This paper proposes SIC (Successive Interference Cancellation) technique in detecting both P-SCH and S-SCH for 3GPP LTE system. Simulation results show that the proposed SIC based detection attains the much improved cell search performance over non-SIC detection in a synchronous network environment. In addition, it also resolves the issue of determination of P-SCH detection threshold by making it as a constant value while the threshold should be changed to higher value as the received SNR is increased in non-SIC based detection.