A serial acquisition scheme based on statistical-hypothesis-testing for asynchronous DS/CDMA systems

One of the most critical problems in asynchronous DS/CDMA reception consists of the effective acquisition of the initial pseudo-noise (PN) synchronism. In particular the multi-user interference (MUI) contrasts the operation to synchronise correctly the system. In this paper, an adaptive PN acquisition scheme based on a statistical hypothesis testing and able to reduce the detrimental effects on the acquisition process of multi-access interference present on the channel is presented. The application considered for the proposed algorithm concerns transmission over an AWGN channel, performed by a DS/CDMA system. The results shown can prove the robustness of the proposed method in presence of different levels of MUI, provided there is a reliable estimation of the channel conditions.