PN Code Acquisition Using Smart Antennas and Adaptive Thresholding Trimmed-Mean CFAR Processing for CDMA Communication

In this paper, we consider a pseudo-noise (PN) code acquisition for direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) communication in a Rayleigh slowly fading multipath channel environment using a smart antenna and adaptive thresholding trimmed-mean constant false alarm rate (TM-CFAR) processing. A smart antenna is an array of antenna elements that can modify the array pattern adaptively to minimize the effect of noise, multiple access interference of other users, and multipath. PN code acquisition using a fixed threshold may lead to an excessive number of false alarms, and thus, adaptive thresholding TM-CFAR processing is considered. This novel approach of combining a smart antenna and adaptive thresholding TM-CFAR detection proved to be very robust since it resulted in a serious enhancement of the detection probability.