PN code acquisition using smart antennas and adaptive thresholding for spread spectrum communications

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a pseudo-noise (PN) code acquisition for direct sequence spread spectrum communication in a Rayleigh fading multipath channel environment using smart antenna and adaptive thresholding automatic trimmed-mean constant false alarm rate (ATM-CFAR) processing. A smart antenna is an array of antenna elements that can modify the array pattern adaptively to minimize the effect of multiple access interference (MAI) from other users and multipath. PN code acquisition using a fixed threshold may lead to an excessive number of false alarms, and thus, adaptive thresholding ATM-CFAR processing is considered. In addition, since the interference (MAI and multipath) can be considered as outliers, an outlier determiner is embedded to the proposed system based on the interquartile range. This novel approach of combining smart antennas and adaptive thresholding ATM-CFAR detection with an outlier determiner proved to be very robust since it resulted in a serious enhancement of the probability of detection.