Code acquisition in CDMA communication system with fictitious pilot signals

In the code-division multiple access (CDMA) communication system, timing estimation of the spreading code is a prerequisite task before symbol demodulation. The first step in this estimation is code acquisition. Its purpose is to get a rough estimate for the delay, which then would be further processed to achieve better accuracy. In this paper we propose a subspace code acquisition algorithm which is based on recently reported minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) methods for blind multiuser detection and pilot-aided synchronization. More precisely, a set of fictitious pilot signals is generated by the former, and used for synchronization purposes by the latter. Moreover, the finite alphabet property is exploited by assuming that the source signals are binary. Comparison is made with the traditional matched filter (MF), Constrained Minimum Output Error (CMOE) detector and MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) method by simulations