PN acquisition and tracking performance in DS/CDMA systems with symbol-length spreading sequences

Direct sequence spread spectrum code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) is receiving increasing attention for cellular communications systems. When the users are synchronized and special symbol-length sequences, such as Gold codes, are used, the mutual interference can be substantially reduced relative to a system with very long or purely random spreading sequences. It is shown that this approach degrades the performance of the code phase acquisition and tracking, however. This effect prevents the system from acquiring and tracking long before the data detection is affected by the multiuser interference.