Performance evaluation of preamble detectors for 3GPP-LTE physical random access channel

In this paper, the problem of preamble detection associated with random access procedure in 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) technology is tackled. Different detection strategies are proposed, both in time and frequency domain, in order to evaluate their performance in terms of missed detection probability (MDP) and hardware complexity. Results show that time-domain detectors are shown to be a valid alternative for preamble detection, since they fulfill the MDP requirements defined in 3GPP-LTE specification. Frequency-domain processing architectures achieve a better performance in terms of MDP, but at the expense of a greater complexity. Implementation requirements can be alleviated by reducing the number of quantization bits for the correlation operations, even up to 1-bit, while barely affecting the performance detection.