Analysis of a differentially coherent DS-SS parallel acquisition receiver

In this paper, a rapid acquisition technique, based on a parallel processing scheme is proposed. The proposed structure consists of a generalized differential detector utilizing N parallel matched filters followed by N multipliers. Under random code sequence assumption, an exact analysis of the performance for differentially-coherent detection in the presence of both thermal noise and self-noise is evaluated. This structure outperforms the classical non-coherent detection scheme by a margin of 4-5 dB in SNR. A new multiple-dwell decision scheme utilizing a single step sequence-based code phase estimation is also proposed and the mean acquisition times for both non-coherent and differential detectors are compared for these two decision schemes