Performance analysis of pre-correlation differential acquisition scheme

Pre-correlation differential detection (PDD) scheme is studied for global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receiver design. By performing a differential detection at the chip or sample level before correlation process, the effect of both data and residual carrier is eliminated which in turn allows for frequency independent code phase acquisition. Hence the search space and computational complexity is reduced to a large extent. The detection performance of this type of scheme is analysed in terms of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and verified by simulation.