Acquisition time distribution for spread-spectrum receivers

Serial search spread-spectrum code acquisition is analyzed. A modified flow graph is presented. It permits the use of a generalized lock strategy and allows the false alarm time to be treated as a random variable. The distribution of acquisition time is obtained directly by using an extended generalization of Bernoulli trials. Compared to recent work which uses a fixed penalty false alarm time, the analysis is more general and requires fewer assumptions and approximations. The analysis is suitable for both single dwell and multidwell systems. Examples are presented to show the effect on the acquisition time distribution of sequence length and normalized detection threshold