A new analysis of direct-sequence pseudo-noise code acquisition on Rayleigh fading channels

Accurate performance evaluation of direct-sequence (DS) pseudo-noise code acquisition on Rayleigh fading channels is investigated in this paper. Due to the correlations between cell detections incurred by fading, the traditional direct and flow-graph approaches for performance evaluation of an acquisition system are not applicable to a fading channel. In this paper, a new analysis is proposed for accurate evaluation of the acquisition performance on Rayleigh fading channels. The analysis can include various search strategies, correlators and test methods with different performance measures: probability mass function (PMF) and/or moments of acquisition time. Analytical and computer simulation results show that the new method predicts the acquisition performance very accurately.