Fast Antijamming Timing Acquisition Using Multilayer Synchronization Sequence

Pseudonoise (PN) sequences are widely used as preamble sequences to establish timing synchronization in military wireless communication systems. At the receiver, searching and detection techniques, such as the full parallel search (FPS) and the serial search (SS), are usually adopted to acquire correct timing position. However, the synchronization sequence has to be very long to combat jamming that reduces the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to an extremely low level. In this adverse scenario, the FPS scheme becomes too complex to implement, whereas the SS method suffers from the drawback of long mean acquisition time (MAT). In this paper, a fast timing acquisition method is proposed, using the multilayer synchronization sequence based on cyclical codes. Specifically, the transmitted preamble is the Kronecker product of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codewords and PN sequences. At the receiver, the cyclical nature of BCH codes is exploited to test only a part of the entire sequence, resulting in shorter acquisition time. The algorithm is evaluated using the metrics of MAT and detection probability (DP). Theoretical expressions of MAT and DP are derived from the constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) criterion. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our proposed scheme dramatically reduces the acquisition time while achieving similar DP performance and maintaining a reasonably low real-time hardware implementation complexity, in comparison with the SS scheme.