Optimal and suboptimal decision rules for parallel code acquisition in chip-asynchronous DS/SS systems

We investigate optimal and suboptimal decision rules for parallel code acquisition in chip-asynchronous direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS/SS) systems. The conventional decision rule for parallel acquisition is to choose the largest correlator output of a receiver. However, such a scheme is optimum only for chip-synchronous models. In this letter, an optimal decision rule is derived based on the maximum-likelihood criterion for chip-asynchronous models. A simpler suboptimal decision rule is also discussed. The performance of the optimum and suboptimum decision rules is compared to that of the conventional decision rule. Numerical results show, that for chip-asynchronous models, both the optimal and suboptimal decision rules outperform the conventional decision rule.