A UNIFIED TIME-DOMAIN ANALYSIS OF SERIAL SEARCH WITH APPLICATION TO SPREAD-SPECTRUM RECEIVERS

The paper presents a time-domain approach to the analysis of the code phase acquisition process in direct sequence spread spectrum receivers . This approach is suitable for a variety of search and verification/l ock strategies. The time-domain approach is more direct than the unifi ed z transform-domain approach [1]-[6] and permits computation of the acquisition time distribution. The paper also provides equations for c alculating the mean acquisition time under various search and verifica tion/lock strategies. The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated b y application to a specific nontrivial case of practical significance.