Adaptive PN Code Acquisition in Multi-Path Spread Spectrum Communications Using FPGA

In multi-path spread spectrum communications, signals from different paths may affect the performance of the pseudo-noise (PIN) code detectors. In this paper, the performances of two PN code detectors, cell averaging constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) and order statistics CFAR (OS-CFAR) are analysed and compared in terms of the mean acquisition time (MAT) and probability of detection (P_D). The detectors utilise a digital matched filter (MF). Complexity and hardware consumption with field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation are taken into comparison to determine the CFAR detector with the best performance.