Abstract

This Thesis investigates a host of new synchronization techniques for WCDMA. We assume the presence of more than one base station (BS) (multi-target) in the vicinity of the mobile station (MS), and consider the effects of multipath, Raleigh fading, and different carrier frequency offsets. Through the Thesis, we concentrate on the first stage of the three-stage cell search procedure which is slot synchronization. The slot synchronization stage has been always the most challenging stage since it deals with the largest amount of uncertainty in the cell search, and it determines the timing resolution to the other two stages. We also introduce the concept of using parallel code verification circuits to be added to the state of art pipelined techniques to yield better synchronization results. The received WCDMA synchronization codes are combined in different scenarios according to the proposed non-coherent synchronization technique. The results are compared with recent approaches of combining the WCDMA synchronization codes. The comparison reveals some improvements in the mean synchronization time for some of our rules herein. It also shows superiority of the new rules for different carrier frequency offsets especially at low signal to interference ratios.