Performance analysis of a second order delay-lock loop with application to a CDMA system with multipath propagation

CDMA systems require synchronization between the received sequence and the locally generated sequence. This is done by means of a delay-lock loop (DLL). The differential equation of an incoherent second-order DLL has been programmed. The mean time to lose lock (MTLL) of the DLL is a very important design parameter. The authors have obtained this parameter by computer simulation and are able to plot the MTLL as a function of the signal to noise ratio in the data bandwidth. In a narrow-band system, the simulation shows that the effect of the fast Rayleigh fading is a performance degradation even with high mean signal to noise ratio. Assuming a wide-band system, so that the receiver has enough bandwidth to resolve the different propagation paths, the authors propose a modified DLL scheme. The MTLL of the proposed DLL is evaluated using a dynamic simulation of the multipath channel. The results show an improvement with respect to the conventional DLL