Interference cancelling related to chip acquisition in CDMA receivers

Interference cancellation at the CDMA receiver requires the knowledge about relative time delays in the received signal from the different users. This knowledge can be obtained during the synchronization process. This paper quantitatively investigates the relationship between the interference cancellation and chip acquisition by using ordering statistics of acquisition times. The paper presents an approach to calculate the probability of the time to acquire all simultaneous users, as a function of the number of the users. Interference cancellation may be performed at the input or output of the correlator. The paper shows that the interference cancellation at the correlator input speeds up the acquisition when E/sub b//N/sub 0/ is high (10 dB for example).