PN code acquisition using signed-rank-based detector in non-Gaussian impulsive channels

In this paper, a new detector is proposed for code acquisition, which employs the signs and ranks of the received signal samples, instead of their actual values, and so does not require knowledge of the non-Gaussian noise dispersion. The mean acquisition performance of the proposed detector is compared with that of the detector of S. Yoon et al. (2004). The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is not only robust to deviations from the true value of the non-Gaussian noise dispersion, but also has comparable performance to that of the scheme of S. Yoon et al. (2004) using exact knowledge of the non-Gaussian noise dispersion.