Initial synchronization of DS-CDMA via bursty pilot signals

We consider initial timing acquisition in discrete-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) when propagation is affected by multipath and fading, and where the base-station broadcasts a synchronization pilot signal in the form of bursts of modulated chips transmitted periodically and separated by long silent intervals. Subject to certain simplifying assumptions, we derive the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator by solving a constrained maximization problem. Our ML timing estimator has constant complexity per observation sample. The relation to other estimation methods is addressed, and performance comparisons are provided by simulation. The proposed estimator yields good performance independently of the multipath-intensity profile of the channel, provided that the delay spread is not larger than a given maximum spread. Moreover, our estimator is fairly robust to the mismatch in the fading Doppler spectrum and provides good performance for both fast and slow fading.