Parallel acquisition in mobile DS-CDMA systems

This paper presents the performance of a direct sequence spread spectrum acquisition scheme in a mobile terrestrial communications system. The effects of fading, multipath, power control, shadowing, multiple access interference, out-of-cell interference, vehicle speed, voice activity, and sectorization are examined. The acquisition scheme uses noncoherent detection and a parallel search strategy. The analysis is done for the reverse link of a mobile code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system. The purpose of this paper is to derive the acquisition performance of a mobile communications system under practical assumptions, and give realistic capacity estimates based on acquisition performance criteria.