Performance Analysis of 3-Stage Cell Search Process in a WCDMA System

In this article, we study the performance benefits of the cell search algorithm. The purpose of the cell search algorithm in Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) is to estimate the spreading code of the serving base-station and its corresponding timing offset. We study the performance benefits of estimating multiple “code-time” hypotheses in each stage of the cell search process. In addition, we also study the effect of oversampling and nonideal sampling. The improved cell search design (CSD) proposed in this article aims to achieve faster synchronization between the mobile station (MS) and the base station (BS) and thus improves system performance, also has lower hardware utilization when compared with the third generation partnership project (3GPP)-comma free cell search design scheme under the same design constraints.