On the Asymptotic Performance of Multi-Dwell Signal Acquisition in Dense Multipath Channels

This paper investigates the mean acquisition time (MAT) of an acquisition system that employs an optimal multi-dwell detector at the detection layer. We derive lower bound and upper bound expressions for the cases when the search layer employs the optimal search procedure and the conventional serial search. The bounds depend only on a few parameters at the detection layer and can be used for the design and analysis of a broad class of multi-dwell detectors. The results indicate that in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, an intelligent search procedure improves the MAT of the conventional serial search by approximately Nhit times, where Nhit is proportional to the number of propagation paths. On the other hand, for a low SNR regime, only moderate improvement can be obtained. The results in this paper are valid for any fading statistic