Detection of direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals in a multipath fading environment

In this thesis, we study the effect of Rice fading on the performance of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. The field-theoretic foundation of pseudo-random-noise (PRN) codes, their implementation, and their use in generating unique navigation messages in the GPS receiver is reviewed. The processing of the spread-spectrum signals within the digital delay locked loop (DDLL) in the receiver is also considered. In particular, we derive numerical expressions that can be easily evaluated for the probability error and the mean-time to lose-lock, for a DDL operating in an additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in the presence of Rice fading. The results obtained generalize results in the literature for the Rayleigh fading environment.