A multi-purpose threshold detector for mobile radio application

In mobile radio systems, a receiver can always benefit from side information about transmission quality. This can be useful during call set-up or simply detection or decoding. However, this information is usually signal-to-noise ratio dependent, hence not easy to implement in a dynamic manner in the receiver. The authors present a multi-purpose threshold detector for mobile radio application. Its detection capability is independent of the signal-to-noise ratio above a pre-defined lower limit. After a brief description of the principle, they show what is the decision variable to be computed and to which threshold it should be compared. They first apply the proposed scheme to synchronization acquisition in spread-spectrum CDMA systems. Computer simulation results depict the gain brought by the proposed detector. They finally examine other potential applications such as signal-to-noise ratio estimation for both CDMA and TDMA systems