A systematic approach to code phase acquisition in DS-CDMA

A new approach to the problem of code phase acquisition is presented. The proposed search strategy is formulated in terms of a single correlator device, and a comparison to the traditional serial search is performed. The new strategy combines two processes. First, there is a sorting part which converges to the most probable delay in a statistical sense. As a second part, a detection process is performed. Combining both parts results in a systematic acquisition process. It appears that the proposed algorithm is insensitive to the received signal's initial code phase. Using the proposed approach reduces the mean and, essentially, the variance of the time-to-first-fix (TTFF), resulting in an efficient and reliable acquisition process.