Acquisition performance of CDMA systems with multiple antennas

This paper discusses the code-acquisition problem for preamble search in the code-division multiple-access (CDMA) uplink when multiple antennas are employed for signal reception. The multiple antennas are used either in the form of antenna array for beamforming or in the form of antenna diversity. The performance of a maximum-likelihood (ML) code-acquisition technique utilizing beamforming is analyzed by considering the detection, miss, and false-alarm probabilities. This analysis is based on the statistics of the CDMA noncoherent demodulator and beamformer output. In the case of a code-acquisition scheme utilizing antenna diversity, the probability density function of a decision variable is analytically derived for multiple antennas. The expressions for the probabilities of detection, miss, and false alarm are also presented. The acquisition performance and mean acquisition time for both code-acquisition techniques are numerically evaluated and compared. The code-acquisition approaches with multiple antennas are shown to provide much better performance than the corresponding scheme with a single antenna in a frequency-selective fading channel.