Noncoherent detectors for PN code acquisition in the presence of data modulation

Abstract

Noncoherent detectors for use in acquiring data-modulated direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS/SS) signals are considered in this paper. Taking data modulation and timing uncertainty into account and using the generalized maximum likelihood (GML) or maximum likelihood (ML) detection approaches, we derive optimal detectors in the sense of Bayes or Neyman-Pearson and propose various suboptimal detectors. A simple systematic means for their realization is suggested and the numerical performance of these detectors is presented. We also compare their performance with that of the noncoherent combining (NC1) detector that had been proposed to serve the same need. Numerical results show that even the proposed suboptimal detectors can outperform the NC1 detector in most cases of interest.