Accurate pilot assisted PN code acquisition

In this paper, we consider simple and efficient initial PN code timing acquisition in the direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) communication system. A key assumption is that a constant preamble is available for the desired user, which makes efficient suppression of uncorrelating interferers and noise possible by differential correlations. It also enables very accurate chip timing offset estimation with two successive outputs of the differential correlator. The complexity of the method is near to the matched filter but the performance is superior compared to it, especially in highly loaded systems