Modified Zero-Padding Method for Fast Long PN-Code Acquisition

To improve the mean acquisition time performance of the zero-padding (ZP) method, we propose to fully exploit the computation capability of FFT by partially folding the local pseudo-noise (PN) code. The detection and mean acquisition time performance of the proposed method is analyzed and compared with that of the zero-padding method. It is shown that the proposed method can reduce the mean acquisition time significantly at the expense of less than 1.5 dB degradation in detection performance.