Effect of CW and pulse jamming on direct-sequence spread-spectrum code acquisition using a sequential detector

The authors use a Monte-Carlo computer simulation to examine the effect of continuous-wave (CW) and pulse jamming, in the presence of additive Gaussian noise, on the acquisition performance of a noncoherent serial-search pseudonoise code synchronizer. The acquisition performances of three variants of the sequential detector, namely, the quantized log-likelihood detector, the biased square-law detector, and the ideal log-likelihood detector, are compared, and the degradation in performance is assessed. It is shown that, in the presence of Gaussian noise, the pulse jammer with a properly chosen duty factor can significantly degrade the acquisition performance compared to the CW jammer. Further, the pulsed jammer with a duty factor approaches 1.0 behaves similarly to the CW jammer at values of jammer-to-signal (J/S) less than 5 dB.<>