A noncoherent sequential PN code acquisition scheme in DS/SS receivers

A noncoherent sequential PN code acquisition technique is proposed in this paper. Noncoherent detection is employed to handle the seriously noisy environments, while the carrier frequency offset and data modulation effects can be simultaneously taken care of. To realize the sequential acquisition, the out-of-phase and in-phase sequences are properly modeled to avoid the significantly high error probabilities caused by the conventional widely used zero sequence model. Extensive computer simulation results indicated that the proposed PN code acquisition outperforms the fixed-dwell-time counterparts by roughly 2 - 6 dB with much lower false alarm and miss probabilities, and the superiority of the proposed technique becomes more significant at lower SNR conditions.