Initial frequency acquisition in W-CDMA

In this paper, methods of estimating the initial frequency error are proposed and evaluated for a mobile station (MS) operated in a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. It is assumed that the initial frequency error of a MS can be as large as /spl plusmn/20 kHz due to the inaccuracy of the crystal oscillator. The proposed methods are based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique with quadratic interpolation in the frequency domain to improve the accuracy of frequency estimation. It is found that the proposed FFT based algorithms achieve much better performance when compared to a differential phase detection approach.