Joint-Detection for Doppler-Shift Acquisition in Space Communications

For space communications, the long distance and high-speed movement between the transmitter-receiver pair cause very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high dynamic Doppler-shift. Hence, how to acquire the Doppler-shift value from received signals becomes an inevitable problem for signal recovery. In this letter, a joint-detection scheme, which uses multiple combination periods to narrow the search range for Doppler-shift acquisition, is firstly proposed to increase the acquisition probability. Also, the theoretical analysis and simulations results are presented to evaluate this scheme.