On the acquisition-time distribution and optimizing the acquisition system performance in spread-spectrum receivers

This paper analyzes the distribution of the acquisition time in serial search systems with transform domain technique. The analysis is general and without any approximation. It allows false alarm to be treated as a random variable. This approach shows that the method is much easier in practice and faster than other methods which use time domain techniques. Based on this analysis, a general approximation method for computing the cumulative probability density function (cdf) is presented. The acquisition circuit parameters are optimized in order to minimize the mean of the acquisition-time or time required for a certain cdf(T_a). Finally the differences of their respective parameters are compared