An energy-efficient comparison of classical detectors for CDMA code synchronization

This paper studies the performance of coherent and noncoherent code alignment detectors in the uplink of a flat-fading CDMA wireless network. A distributed resource allocation scheme in which each pair transmitter-receiver can set its own transmit power and detection threshold is considered to maximize the probability of code detection per consumed energy at the transmitter under a constraint on the maximum probability of spurious code locks. The proposed analytical framework proves that the coherent detector slightly outperforms noncoherent synchronizers in terms of energy efficiency at the Nash equilibrium, although the performance of the two classes is substantially equivalent.