Search strategy effects on PN acquisition performance

The present paper focusses on 'random' and 'expanding window' PN acquisition search strategies and analytically develops the PN acquisition time statistics as functions of salient system parameters such as prediction SNR, detection and false alarm probabilities and a priori information on epoch location. The significance of this analysis is its general applicability to arbitrary postdetection processing schemes. Computed performance results account for the above salient parameters, wherein sequential detection is employed in conjunction with random and selected expanding window search strategies.