A Novel Synchronisation Scheme for Spread Spectrum Communications

Abstract

There has been an increase in interest in recent years in the use of burst-mode spread spectrum signals for radio channel access schemes and packet radio transmissions. In this application, the traditional technique of using a known preamble, which can be used to synchronise the receiver, incurs an unacceptable overhead because of the low number of information bits to be sent. Thus it becomes desirable to acquire synchronisation directly from the information bearing signal. The paper commences by examining established direct sequence spread spectrum burst acquisition schemes using block signal processing techniques as typified by Kajiwara et al. [ 1,2]. We then state the limitations of this technique and proceed to propose an alternative scheme and conclude by comparing the results.