Generalized Zero-Padding Scheme for Direct GPS P-code Acquisition

Because of the long period and high chip rate of GPS P-code, direct acquisition is challenging. In the letter, the widely used Zero-Padding Scheme (ZPS) for direct GPS P-code acquisition is generalized to investigate the effects of the ZPS on detection performance, parallel searching capability, and mean acquisition time. It is shown that, by adjusting the zeros padded to received signal according to signal to noise ratio, the Generalized Zero-Padding Scheme (GZPS) makes a better tradeoff between detection performance and parallel searching capability and further reduces mean acquisition time. The generalized zero-padding scheme can be easily applied to the previously proposed Zero-Padding Method (ZPM) and the Direct Average Method (DAM) to improve their mean acquisition time performance and it does not increase the implementation complexity of a receiver.