Direct sequence spread spectrum parallel acquisition in a nonselective Rician fast fading channel

The authors investigate the performance of the direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) parallel acquisition system, previously proposed by the authors (1989) for a nonselective Rician fading channel. The acquisition system utilizes a bank of parallel I-Q noncoherent matched filters for the search mode, and a coincidence detector for the verification mode. The probabilities of detection, false alarm, and missing are derived for the channel under consideration, from which the mean and variance of the acquisition time are evaluated as a measure of the system performance. It is shown that both the mean and variance decrease when the specular component is stronger. The variance decreases rapidly as the signal-to-noise ratio increases while the mean acquisition time reaches its minimum. It is also shown that the effect of the parameters of the fading process is very small