Performance analysis of initial cell search using time tracker for W-CDMA

The cell search scheme for W-CDMA consists of the following three stages: slot synchronization (stage 1), group identification and frame boundary detection (stage 2), and long code identification (stage 3). The performance of the cell search when a mobile station is switched on, which is referred to as initial cell search, is decreased by the initial frequency and timing error. In this paper, we propose the pipeline structured initial cell search scheme using time trackers to compensate for the impact of the initial timing error in the 2^nd stage and the 3^rd stage. The simulation results show that the stage 2 performance of the proposed scheme is about 2 dB better than that of the conventional one when the initial timing error is near ±Tc/2