Efficient acquisition algorithm for long pseudorandom sequence

In this paper, a novel method termed the phase coherence acquisition (PCA) is proposed for pseudorandom (PN) sequence acquisition. By employing complex phasors, the PCA requires only complex additions in the order of N, the length of the sequence, whereas the conventional method using fast Fourier transform (FFT) requires complex multiplications and additions both in the order of N log2N. To combat noise, the input and local sequences are partitioned and mapped into complex phasors in PCA. The phase differences between pairs of input and local phasors are used for acquisition; thus, complex multiplications are avoided. For more noise-robustness capability, the multilayer PCA is developed to extract the code phase step-by-step. The significant reduction of computational loads makes the PCA an attractive method, especially when the sequence length of N is extremely large, which becomes intractable for the FFT-based acquisition.