A systematic approach to code phase acquisition in DS-CDMA

A new approach to the problem of code phase acquisition is presented. The proposed search strategy is formulated in terms of a single correlator device, and a comparison to the traditional serial search is performed. The new strategy combines two processes. First, there is a sorting part which converges to the most probable delay in a statistical sense. As a second part, a detection process is performed. Combining both parts results in a systematic acquisition process. It appears that the proposed algorithm is insensitive to the received signal´s initial code phase. Using the proposed approach reduces the mean and, essentially, the variance of the time-to-first-fix (TTFF), resulting in an efficient and reliable acquisition process.