Mathematical modeling and performance analysis for a two-stage acquisition scheme for direct-sequence spread-spectrum CDMA

Acquisition of synchronism is considered for DS/SS CDMA systems. For large systems with large timing uncertainties, it has been shown previously that acquisition in the presence of multiple-access interference may impose a significant limitation on capacity. This leads the authors to consider a system in which timing uncertainties are relatively small and to propose an acquisition scheme which exploits this to reduce complexity and acquisition overhead. The proposal may be appropriate for a microcellular environment for personal communications in which CDMA packet transmission is employed for both voice and data. Packetized transmission would imply that the overhead available for acquisition is small, and the large number of microcells would restrict the cost of the acquisition scheme used in the receiver in each microcell. The acquisition time required for a simple serial search scheme may therefore be unacceptably large. On the other hand, while acquisition using a passive matched filter is fast, the filter length required for reliable acquisition is liable to be excessive in terms of cost and complexity. Motivated by these considerations, the authors propose a two-stage acquisition scheme which employs a short programmable matched filter for initial detection, followed by a correlator for verification. Numerical results based on an approximate analysis of acquisition performance in the presence of multiple access interference are employed to compare the scheme with conventional acquisition schemes