What is Linguistic Variables

The acquisition system is one of the most sensitive stages in a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DS-SS) receiver (Peterson, Ziemer & Borth, 1995), due to its critical position in order to demodulate the received information. There are several schemes to deal with this problem, such as serial search and parallel algorithms (Proakis, 1995). Serial search algorithms have slow convergence time but their computational load is very low; on the other hand, parallel systems converge very quickly but their computational load is very high. In our system, the acquisition scheme used is the multiresolutive structure presented in (Moran, Socoró, Jové, Pijoan & Tarrés, 2001), which combines quick convergence and low computational load. The decisional system that evaluates the acquisition stage is a key process in the overall system performance, being a drawback of the structure. This becomes more important when dealing with time-varying channels, where signal to noise ratio (called SNR) is not a constant parameter. Several factors contribute to the performance of the acquistion system (Glisic & Vucetic, 1997): channel distorsion and variations, noise and interference, uncertainty about the code phase, and data randomness. The existence of all these variables led us to think about the possibility of using fuzzy logic to solve this complex acquisition estimation (Zadeh, 1973). A fuzzy logic acquisition estimator had already been tested and used in our research group to control a serial search algorithm (Alsina, Morán & Socoró, 2005) with encouraging results, and afterwards in the multiresolutive scheme (Alsina, Mateo & Socoró, 2007), and other applications to this field can be found in bibliography as (Bas, Pérez & Lagunas, 2001) or (Jang, Ha, Seo, Lee & Lee, 1998). Several previous works have been focused in the development of acquisition systems for non frequency selective channels with fast SNR variations (Moran, Socoró, Jové, Pijoan & Tarrés, 2001) (Mateo & Alsina, 2004).