A systematic approach to code phase acquisition in DS-CDMA

In this paper a new approach to the problem of code phase acquisition is presented. The proposed search strategy is formulated in terms of a single correlator device, and a comparison to the traditional serial search is performed. The new strategy combines a sorting part first, which converges to the most probable delay in a statistical sense. As a second part, detection process is performed. Combining both parts results with a systematic acquisition process. It appears that the proposed algorithm is insensitive to the received signal initial code phase. Using the proposed approach reduces the mean and essentially the variance of the time to first fix (TTFF) resulting with an efficient and reliable acquisition process.