Comparison of the Acquisition Performance of the Matched Filter and Integrate-and-Dump Receivers in a Multipath Delay and Fading Environment

The Matched Filter and the Integrate-and-Dump circuit techniques are both attractive acquisition methods for CDMA systems. Acquisition using the matched filter technique has attracted considerable interest in recent years since it shows a better performance in the presence of Gaussian noise. On the other hand acquisition using an integrate-and-dump circuit is attractive because it is less complex to implement. However, the acquisition performance can be affected significantly by the channel characteristics. In this paper, a numerical method and a computer simulation have been developed in order to compare the two acquisition systems in different propagation environments. Results show that the acquisition using a matched filter is much faster than that using the integrate-and-dump circuit for the reception of spread-spectrum signals in the presence of Gaussian noise. However, in a multipath delay and fading environment, the results show that the mean acquisition time using the matched filter is not always faster than that using the integrate-and-dump circuit. The results show that it depends on the fading, the delay, the number of users and the signal-to-noise ratio.