Performance of parallel code acquisition schemes for multicarrier CDMA over frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels

We investigate the issue of pseudonoise (PN) code acquisition in a multicarrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) system, which is suitable for high data rate transmissions. Specially, we investigate the acquisition performance of a pure parallel acquisition scheme over frequency-selective fading channels under the multiple in-phase states (H/sub 1/ cells) hypothesis, considering both noncoherent equal gain combining (EGG) and selection combining (SC) of the correlator outputs associated with the sub-carriers. It is demonstrated that the acquisition performance of the MC-CDMA scheme is better than that of the equivalent single-carrier CDMA (SC-CDMA) benchmarker, when EGC is employed, and it is similar to that of the single-carrier CDMA scheme, when SC is employed.