Multipath Aided Rapid Acquisition Techniques for Spread Spectrum Signals

Spread-spectrum systems with large transmission bandwidth present significant challenges from the standpoint of achieving acquisition before the communication commences. This paper investigates a rapid acquisition procedure that exploits multipath to aid the synchronization. In particular, we consider a randomized search strategy and derive the corresponding mean acquisition time (MAT). We show that the MAT of the randomized search is at most twice the MAT of the optimal serial search. Using our results, we compare various search techniques in a multipath fading channel