The key factors in overcoming for weak global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signal acquisition are sensitivity and dwell time. In the conventional MAX/TC criteria, a preset threshold value is used to determine whether the signal exists. Thus the threshold is calculated carefully to balance the sensitivity and the dwell time. Affected by various environment noise and interference, the acquisition circuit will enter verifying mode frequently to eliminate false alarms, which will extend the mean acquisition time (MAT). Based on the periodicity of spread spectrum code in GNSS, this paper presents an improved double-dwell scheme that uses no threshold in detecting weak GNSS signals. By adopting this method, the acquisition performance of weak signal is significantly improved. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation are presented detailed. Compared with the conventional MAX/TC criteria, the proposed method achieves improved performance in terms of detection probability and false alarm rate. Furthermore, the MAT decreases 15s when C/N0 is above 20dB-Hz. This can enhance the receiver sensitivity and shorten the time to first fix (TTFF).

The large Doppler offset that exists in high dynamic environments poses a serious impediment to the acquisition of direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) signals. To ensure acceptable detection probabilities, the frequency space has to be finely divided, which leads to complicated acquisition structures and excessively long acquisition time at low SNR. A local frequency folding (LFF) method designed for combined application with established techniques dedicated to PN-code synchronization is proposed in this paper. Through modulating local PN-code block with a fixed waveform obtained by folding all frequency cells together, we eliminate the need for frequency search and ease the workload of acquisition. We also analyze the performance of LFF and find that the detection performance degradation from folding can be compensated by FFT-based coherent integration. The study is complemented with numerical simulations showing that the proposed method has advantages over unfolding methods with respect to detection probability and mean acquisition time, and the advantage becomes obvious but limited if the folded number gets larger.

We analyze the performance of an adaptive hybrid search code acquisition algorithm for direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems under slowly-moving mobile environments. The code acquisition algorithm is designed to provide the desired feature of constant false alarm rate (CFAR) to cope with nonstationarity of interference in CDMA forward links. An analytical expression for the mean acquisition time is first derived and the probabilities of detection, miss, and false alarm are then obtained for frequency-selective Rayleigh fading environments. The fading envelope of a received signal is assumed to be constant over the duration of post-detection integration (PDI), which is most reasonable, especially for slowly-moving mobile environments. The performance of the designed code acquisition algorithm shall be evaluated numerically to examine the effect of some design parameters, such as the sub-window size, the size of the PDI, the decision thresholds in search and verification modes, and so on, considering IMT-2000 environments.

This letter presents a new probability expression for a multi-carrier (MC) DS/CDMA acquisition system with a reference matched filter (RMF). To evaluate the mean acquisition time (MAT) as a measure of the system performance, the probabilities of detection, miss, and false alarm are derived. From the results, it is shown that the MAT of the MC-CDMA hybrid system with RMF is comparable to the optimum mean acquisition time of the conventional MC-CDMA hybrid system, maintaining approximately the same degree of structuring complexity.