DSA: a distributed sample-based fast DS/CDMA acquisition technique

We propose a new acquisition scheme called distributed sample acquisition (DSA) which is applicable to the direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) system with a long-period pseudonoise (PN) sequence. The proposed scheme lays its foundations on an auxiliary PN sequence called the igniter sequence, which has relatively short period, and the distributed sample scrambling (DSS) technique previously developed for the asynchronous transfer mode cell transmission. In the DSA scheme, acquisition is done in three steps. First, the igniter sequence is synchronized, which normally takes a very short time due to its short period. Second, the state samples of the long-period PN sequence generator in the transmitter, which are conveyed to the receiver over the igniter sequence stream, are determined out of the synchronized igniter sequence. Third, the long-period PN sequence is synchronized by applying the state samples to the DSS receiver. Since the operation of each step takes a very short time, the overall acquisition is done very quickly. We analyze the acquisition time performance of the proposed scheme by taking the transform domain approach, confirming that the resulting mean acquisition time is dramatically reduced. If compared with the existing serial-search scheme, the DSA scheme can perform acquisition about 100 times faster when the period of the PN sequence is 2¹⁵-1. None the less, the additional circuit complexity for its implementation is very small