Noise Performance of a Matched Filter PN Code Synchroniser Using a Maximum Likelihood Detector

R F Ormondroyd School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
ABSTRACT Using a computer simulation, this paper compares the acquisition performance of a digital matched filter PN code synchroniser,based on a simple threshold detector, with that using a maximum likelihood detector under conditions of additive Gaussian noise. Both types of synchroniser have a hard-limiter at their input. It is found that the conventional digital matched filter synchroniser has excellent acquisition performance in relatively good to moderately poor input SNRs, but fails as the input SNR falls below a threshold SNR, whereas the maximum likelihood detector system has good acquisition performance over a much wider nnge of input SNR, even with data modulation.

values [ 11. Here, a priori knowledge of the operation of the system is used to search those code epochs which are most likely to lead to synchronisation first and then to expand the area of search only if these have not lead to synchronisation. Because of the very poor SIR at the input to the synchroniser, the correlator output is corrupted by noise and the lock-detector may indicate lock prematurely (a false alarm) or may miss a correct indication of lock. Both consequences worsen the search time, particularly the occurrence of the false alarm which may take a long time to be verified. If an active correlator is being used it is possible to reduce the effects of noise on the probability of correctly detecting lock ( P d ) and the by correlating the codes probability of a false alarm (Pf,) for a longer time (the dwell-time) before updating the code epoch. This can reduce the acquisition time in poor SIR conditions: however, it can also result in a linear increase in search time with dwell-time if the SIR is relatively good. For the case of the digital matched filter of figure 1, signal averaging is over the fixed code length.
DIGITAL MATCHED FILTER SYNCHRONISER The advantage of using a digital matched filter for many systems is that the passive correlation is formed within a single chip period, rather than over the dwell-time, zd, which is many chip periods. For a code sequence of length, L , with a chip rate, fc = l / T c , the passive correlator signal consists of a train of impulses corresponding to the in-lock condition, which occur at a

INTRODUCTION Serial-search synchronisation systems are widely used to obtain coarse synchronisation between the locally generated replica pseudo-noise sequence and the noisecorrupted received sequence in direct-sequence spreadspectrum receivers. These systems use the measure of correlation between the two sequences to indicate whether or not they are in coarse synchronisation. The correlator can be based on active correlation or passive correlation using a digital matched filter. In this paper, passive correlation is assumed. A baseband model of the serial search strategy is shown in figure 1.

If the correlation value is low, it is probable that synchronisation has not been achieved. The code phase of the locally generated code is then updated according to some search strategy and the new correlation value is then obtained and checked. If the correlation value is

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Figure I Schematic block diagram of a seriai-senrch PN code acquisition system based on a mtchedfilter high however, this indicates that coarse synchronisation is likely and the search is stopped. During the initial search, a number of strategies can be followed. The simplest is to linearly increment the phase of the local code by one cell (typically 0.5 chip). Thus, in noisefree conditions, a code of L chips would have 2L cells and, on average, it would take L cell phase updates to achieve coarse lock to within 0.5 chip. Other strategies based on binary search patterns and expanding window searches can also be used to try and skew the likelihood of acquisition away from the average value, L , to lower
0-7803-3567-8/96/$5.00 0 1996 IEEE 1146

period of L/jc. Thus, in noise free conditions, with two cells per chip, lock can be obtained, on average, after L/fc seconds for the matched filter structure compared with Lzd seconds for the serial synchroniser. It would appear, therefore, that since l l f , << zd, the matched filter offers faster acquisition than the fixeddwell detector. However, because of noise on the input signal, the matched filter output samples have a random component giving rise to false alarms and missed

detections of the in-lock signal. In this case, because of the fixed structure of the digital matched filter, it is not possible to improve the reliability of the sample estimates from the passive correlator except by. increasing the length of the code, which effectively increases the dwell-time. Indeed, when a simple threshold decision is made on the output of the matched filter at low SNRs, Pd can be lower and Pfa can be much higher than for the fixed-dwell detector and this counteracts any benefits resulting from the higher decision rate at the detector. Consequently, in high levels of noise, it is by no means certain that the matched filter will outperform the active correlator serial search system.

f the noise and hard results by showing the effect o limiting on the mean value of the wanted sample output and on the mean value of the spurious values. Two curves are shown for the spurious output. One assumes that only the mean of the peak positive spurii are of interest, whereas the other curve assumes that an absolute value detector is being used. The difference between peak positive and absolute peak spurii is relatively small.

An analysis of the mean acquisition time of a digital matched filter PN code synchroniser has been carried out by Pandit [21 for the case where the codes are at baseband and there is no data modulated onto the PN code. Let Tv be the time interval in which a false alarm occumng can affect the Vrh impulse at an instant t , and let Pav be the probability of detecting this Correlation impulse. If Pd is the probability of detection of a correlation impulse, nfa is the false a l m rate of the detector with T , as the false alarm verification time, then the mean acquisition time T,,,, is given by [2]:

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Figure 2 Effect o f the input SNR on the mean values of the wanted and peak spurious output samples from the digitalfilter in AWGN and hard-limiter input

Thus, as for all types of serial synchroniser, the acquisition performance of the system depends very critically on the probabilities of detection and false alarm under the prevailing noise and interferenceconditions and these in tum depend on the threshold setting of the detector which follows the matched filter. In most cases, it is extremely difficult to get these probabilities in a convenient closed form. In this paper, a computer simulation of the digital matched filter has been carried out in order to obtain the Pd and nfu characteristicsas a function of the key system parameters.

The hard limiter at the input to the digital matched filter effectively acts as an AGC operating on the total received signal. Consequently, as the variance of the noise at the filter input is increased, the mean wanted output from the matched filter, representing the in-lock signal reduces in value. It is apparent that at SNRs worse than -19 dB, where the characteristic of the mean value of the wanted signal crosses the characteristic of the spurii, it would appear to be very difficult to achieve lock because of the large increase in nfu. In practice, however, the situation is more complicated to assess, and it is necessary to examine the amplitude distributions of the wanted and spurious signals at the matched filter output. These are shown in figure 3, for three representative input SNRs.
At relatively good input SNRs (figure 3 6 , there is a clear distinction between the distributions of the wanted and spurious samples and it is a relatively straightforward matter to choose a threshold level which optimises Pd and minimises PfU.

Simulation Results
In the simulation of the matched filter and the detector system, additive Gaussian noise was added to a 2047 chip maximal length sequence prior to hard limiting. The hard limited signal was fed to the matched filter. No data was added to the PN sequence. The clock frequency assumed for the sequence was 3Mchip/s. The time series of outputs from the matched filter represents a single wanted sample value, indicating the in-lock condition, and 2046 sample values indicating an out-of-lock condition. All have random amplitudes due to the effect of the additive noise and hard-limiting. In t h e simulation 1,OOO complete code sequences were passed through the filter and the amplitude distributions of the . wanted and spurious matched filter outputs were obtained at each signal to noise ratio. Figure 2 summarises these

At relatively poor input SNRs (figure 3b) where the mean value of the wanted samples is of the Same order as the mean value of the peak spurii, there is virtually total overlap of the two distributions. However, because the standard deviation of the distribution of the spurii is so much smaller than that of the wanted signal, it is still possible to set a threshold level (typically around a normalised threshold level of 0.10) such that P d . although small, is still useful and larger than the false alarm probability, Pfa. Figure 3c shows the situation at very low input SNRs. Here, the mean of the distribution of the wanted samples is below the mean of the distribution of spurii.

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Again however, because of the difference in the variances of the two distributions, it is still possible to set a threshold level which will ensure that Pd >> P f u . However, in this case, P d is extremely low and this has a very large effect on the mean acquisition time set by equations (1) - (3).

In order to be able to use the mean acquisition time equations, it is necessary to obtain the P d vs. n f u characteristics of the digital matched filter/detector system as a function of the threshold level of the detector. From the simulations carried out above, the effect of threshold level on P d and nfa are shown in figures 4 and 5 , respectively.
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Figure 4 Effect of the threshold level on the probability of detecting the wanted sample in AWGN and hardlimited input It is of interest to note that although the threshold level has a large effect on the false alarm rate, input S N R has a very small effect. These characteristicswere then used with equations (1) - (3) to obtain the mean acquisition time as a function of threshold level at each value of SNR. This is shown in figure 6.
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To obtain this result it was assumed that the verification time was T v r = 10ms. It is seen that the mean acquisition time is sharply optimised with regard to threshold level. The explanation for this is as follows. If the threshold level is set too high, the false alarm rate will be negligible, but the probability of detection will also be low and it is this term which is dominant in setting the mean acquisition time. As the threshold level is lowered P d increases and since this is still the dominant term, Tma reduces. At low threshold settings, nfu increases significantly whilst Pd starts to saturate to a value close to 1 and nfa now becomes the dominant term causing Tma to increase. Note also how the sensitivity of the mean acquisition system to threshold level: (a) gets more critical as the input SNR worsens, (b) the sensitivity to threshold is lower if the threshold is set slightly high (because the effect of an increase in nfa is worse than the effect of a slightly reduced P d . From this graph, it is possible to plot a curve of the optimum value of mean access time vs. S M , as shown in figure 7. For this result, the threshold level is reoptimised at each value of SNR.

gain afforded by the matched filter. The system shown in figure 8 overcomes these restrictions by taking advantage of the periodic nature of PN codes to accumulate the correlation values from the output of the matched filter which are each separated by one entire sequence period. In this system, the output samples from the digital matched filter are accumulated within the register stack. For a digital matched filter of length L there are L accumulator 'bins'. Each matched filter output sample is fed to the appropriate address bin using modulo-L counting. Output samples separated by L sample periods are thus accumulated. If the PN code is not modulated with data, the samples in each bin are simply added, whereas if the PN code is &ita modulated the samples are added as absolute values For the case of a data modulated sequence, it is assumed that the data bit period is precisely one sequence period and is clocked by an appropriate code epoch, such as the 'all 1's' state. Nevertheless, since the precise start point of the sequence is unknown, the matched filter output is degraded due to even and odd uartial correlation uroblems. It is also the register in order to implement a rake type detector and this is particularly important in applications where the received signal undergoes multipath fading. In all cases, a maximum likelihood detector is then used on the combined output to select the largest 'bin' after an appropriate number of accumulations.

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Simulation Results
In this case, maximal length sequences of length 127 chips were used to illustrate the method. As for the case above, Gaussian noise was added to the incoming PN sequence. This was hard limited prior to the matched filter. Two sets of simulations were carried out:- (a) no data modulated onto the code, (b) random data modulated onto the code. In the latter case, it was assumed that the

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Figure 7 Effect of the input SNR on the optimum mean acquisition time for a digital matchedfilter subject to AWGN and hard-limited input DIGITAL MATCHED FILTER WITH MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD DETECTOR The simple digital matched filter synchroniser fails at low input S N R because of the very low Pd and correspondingly high nfa due to the fixed processing

Figure 9 shows a typical result for the case of a data modulated code. In this figure, the probability that the maximum value detected is the correct value is plotted against the number of accumulations (i.e. sequence periods). Consequently by accumulating for a sufficiently large number of times, the probability of false alarm becomes negligible. Although not shown, substantially improved characteristics are obtained for the case where there is no data modulated onto the code due to the fact that the digital

Figure 8 Schematic block diagram of a digital matchedfilter PN synchronisation system based on ='mum likelihood detection
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filter now provides a full correlation rather than a p,artial correlation, and this is reflected in a much improved mean acquisition time characteristic,shown in figure 10.

rate) [3,4]. This system also has data modulation and a hard-limited input.
CONCLUSIONS It is clear that the digital matched filter with threshold detector provides excellent performance in relatively good signal to noise ratio conditions, but the performance is significantly degnded as the S N R worsens. The increased effective dwell time afforded by the accumulator and maximum likelihood detector provide significant performance benefits, even when the code is data modulated. However, the effect of data modulation on code acquisition is severe and the performance of the matched filter with maximum likelihood detection becomes only marginally better than the sequential detector [3,41. However, at very poor SNRs there is an indication that the performance of the sequential detector and the digital matched filter with maximum likelihood detector are very similar. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to thank Dr K Ravi for many fruitful discussions and for his help with the simulation results of the sequential detector. REFERENCES
[l] f o r example Holmes, J K and Woo, K T A n optimum P N code search technique for a given a

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Figure 9 Effert of the number o f accumulations on the probability that the maximum value in the accumulator is the correct in-lock condition, as a function of input SNR In this graph are plotted the mean acquisition characteristics for 90% probability of acquiring lock for the three cases considered. For the case of the digital matched filter with threshold detector, the results are resimulated for a maximal code length of 127 chips and a chip rate of 100kHz.

priori signal location density, NTC 78 Conference record, 1978, pp. 18.6.1 -18.6.6. [2] Pandit, M: Mean acquisition time of active and passive correlation systems for spread-spectrum communications, IEE Proceedings, Vol. 128 P a r t F, NO. 4, pp 100-109 , 1981.
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Log-likelihoodsequential detector (with data)

[3] Ravi, K V and Ormondroyd, R F: Comparison of the acquisition performance o f biased-square-law and quantized log-likelihood sequential detectorsfor PN acquisition, Proceedings of the IEEE Intemational Symposium on Spread-spectrum Techniques and Applications, London, U.K, 1990, pp 53-58 .
[4] Ravi, K.V. and Ormondroyd, R F: Performance of sequential detectors for the acquisition o f data modulated spread-spectrum pseudo noise signals, IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC91, Conference Record, Vol. 2, 1991, pp 19.7.1-19.7.5,
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Figure 10 Effect o f SNR on the mean arquisition time j>r:(a)digital nzatchedfilter and threshold detector, (b) matchedfilter with maximuni likelihood detector , (c) matrhedfilter with maximum likelihood detector and data modulated p.n. code, (d) sequential detector. Also shown in this figure is the corresponding result obtained for serial search using a log-likelihood sequential detector under similar conditions to the matched filter (i.e. 127 chip PN code and lOOkHz chip

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