On the threshold setting principles in code acquisition of DS-SS signals

This paper compares the meaning of different threshold setting principles in the code acquisition process of a direct sequence (DS) spread spectrum (SS) receiver. The consideration is made mainly in one-path additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. A consideration to a fixed multipath channel is given to see its effect on the results. Also, a consideration for a certain type of fading is given in a case where the signal power is assumed to be considerably lower, i.e., faded, part of the time. For the possible performance measures of code acquisition, the main interest is in the mean acquisition time T/sub MA/. The probability of the acquisition in a given observation interval P/sub acq/ is also considered to see if different measures have different demands. A matched filter (MF) acquisition is used with and without a verification mode using an active integration. In the comparisons, fixed thresholds, thresholds based on constant false alarm rate (CFAR) criteria, and optimal thresholds in the sense to give either the minimum T/sub MA/ or the maximum P/sub acq/ are used. The results, which are obtained by using a method of selecting the maximum value at the output of the MF, are compared to the threshold cases. The results can be summarized as follows: when the performance measure is T/sub MA/, the best results are obtained by using CFAR-based threshold comparison. By a proper selection of the probability of a false alarm, the same performance is obtained as by using the optimal thresholds. When the performance measure is P/sub acq/, the maximum-selection method is the best choice.