Analysis of a differentially coherent spread-spectrum acquisition receiver

Differentially coherent detectors for acquisition of BPSK direct sequence spread-spectrum signals on an AWGN channel are analyzed. Under the random code sequence assumption, an exact analysis of the differentially-coherent detection performance for both full period correlation (FPC) and partial period correlation (PPC) is carried out and the results are compared with those of classical non-coherent detection. Finally the mean acquisition times for both single-dwell and multiple-dwell acquisition schemes are compared with their non-coherent counterparts. An improvement of 5 dB in the performance of the receiver is achieved