Evaluation of a soft synchronization technique for DS/SS signals

Soft synchronization of direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS/SS) signals introduces the capability of despreading with a continuously improving estimate of the spreading code. The soft synchronization technique presented and demonstrated in this paper exploits the eigenstructure of a frequency-channelized DS/SS signal to estimate the code. The estimate improves steadily as more data is collected, resulting in an improved estimate of the message signal. This allows commencement of despreading at an early stage when the code-estimate is still imperfect. Under infinite-time average assumptions a perfect code estimate can be obtained when the signal is received in arbitrary levels of white background noise. This paper demonstrates the synchronization performance of the technique through simulations under finite time-average conditions for environments with fading, multipath, and multi-user interference. The soft synchronization capability is demonstrated. Results show that the technique can remove frequency offsets on the received signal that are integer multiples of the code repeat rate, and that its performance is not degraded by multipath.