Improved Zero-Padding Method for Rapid Long PN-Code Acquisition

To improve the mean acquisition time performance of the zero-padding (ZP) method, we propose to reduce the code phases searched in coarse acquisition by summing local pseudo-noise (PN) code and down sampling received signal. The detection and mean acquisition time performance of the proposed method is analyzed and compared with that of the zero-padding method. It is shown that the proposed method further reduces the mean acquisition time at the expense of degrading detection performance.