Adaptive acquisition for DS-SS systems with antenna diversity

We propose an adaptive acquisition system that adjusts the degree of diversity combining without explicit knowledge of the SIR. This system starts code acquisition with no diversity and combines corresponding correlations from different antennas at each code phase to increase the degree of diversity combining whenever a false alarm is declared. The mean acquisition time for the multipath fading environment is evaluated and is compared with other acquisition systems with multiple receiver antennas. The results indicate that the proposed system performs like a parallel search in high SIR and performs like a serial search with full diversity combining in low SIR.