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.