Fast acquisition method using modified PCA with a sparse factor for burst DS spread-spectrum transmission

To improve the acquisition speed and inbound capacity of the ground station in a burst direct-sequence (DS) spread-spectrum transmission system, an acquisition method based on a modified parallel code-phase acquisition (PCA) scheme is proposed. By taking advantage of the sparsity of the acquisition result with PCA in the time domain, we introduce the sparse factor to handle the signals via sparsification and apply the sparse recovery algorithm to search and estimate the acquisition result. The computational complexity, mean acquisition time, and relationship between the inbound capacity and acquisition performance are provided. We theoretically analyse the effect of the sparse factor on the acquisition performance. The estimation errors verify our analysis, and simulations show that the acquisition time of our proposed method outperforms that of advanced PCA by 1.2–4.0 times; additionally, the inbound capacity increases by 6.2–36.7%.