Performance of serial acquisition schemes using antenna arrays in the DS-SS system

We propose two serial schemes using antenna arrays for initial acquisition of direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) signals, which can lower substantially the range of detectable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The first scheme utilizes antenna arrays to obtain simultaneously independent decision samples required for the verification process as well as to enhance the accuracy of the search mode decision by performing the search process based on the coincident detection (CD). The second scheme uses the sum of the independent decision samples from co-phased matched filters (MFs) corresponding to antenna elements as a decision variable in order to enhance the SNR of the resulting signal. Their mean acquisition time performance under the Gaussian channel is analyzed. We show that the acquisition performance of the proposed schemes becomes improved continually as the number of antenna increases.