Serial acquisition techniques for DS-CDMA signals in frequency-selective multi-user mobile channels

This paper compares the mean acquisition time 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 twin-cell detection are characterised. In contrast to the majority of published results considering only one correct timing state (H-1 cell) in the uncertainty region of the pseudo noise (PN) sequence, this paper aims to analyse the mean acquisition time performance of a serial search acquisition scheme considering multiple timing states in the uncertainty region. The mean acquisition time performance comparison between the conventional cell-by-cell detection and the joint twin-cell detection shows that the latter can achieve significantly improved acquisition time performance at almost the same complexity.