Performance Comparison of DS/SS Code Acquisition using MMSE and MVDR Beamforming in Jamming

This paper investigates code acquisition performance of a direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) system where acquisition is aided either by the minimum mean square error (MMSE) or by the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer. The use of the MMSE beamforming increases receiver´s complexity because it requires a matched filter (MF) in each antenna branch separately, whereas only a single MF is needed in the MVDR method. However, the MMSE beamformer has an advantage that it does not need a priori information of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the desired signal unlike the MVDR and many other advanced beamforming algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to compare acquisition performances of the MMSE and the MVDR beamformers. In addition, performance of a single antenna receiver is used as a reference. Obtained results indicate that the MMSE beamformer has the best mean acquisition time performance, although its performance measured via detection probability is worse than in the MVDR method.