In this thesis, I provide a tutorial on the structured design of effective Physical Random Access CHannel (PRACH) preamble detection based on correlation power. Specifically, the main contribution of the thesis is to provide the design methodology lev...
In this thesis, I provide a tutorial on the structured design of effective Physical Random Access CHannel (PRACH) preamble detection based on correlation power. Specifically, the main contribution of the thesis is to provide the design methodology leveraging multi-stage thresholds by which Preamble ID (PID) and PRACH-related time information (Timing Advance) for identifying the transmitted PRACH preamble signal are obtained. For enhancing the effectiveness of the designed PRACH preamble detector, I also consider joint optimization of multi-stage thresholds beyond the individual optimization of each threshold based on the Power Delay Profile (PDP).
I suggest a methodology for more efficient analysis of PDP by analyzing the multi-stage threshold structure utilizing noise threshold, average power threshold, and signal threshold. I also present the structure of a timing threshold to provide more probabilistically accurate time information. And I propose a methodology to refine PDP using multi-stage thresholding to remove noise and misleading data generated by the channel. Additionally, I show the most efficient multi-stage threshold structures for Additional White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and Tapped Delay Line (TDL) channel environments and the optimized scaling factor values for each environment.
Consequently, the designed PRACH preamble detector is shown to have a reasonable performance in the sense of detection and false alarm probabilities, which is validated through numerical simulations considering the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) conformance test. Furthermore, it shows high performance in lower SNR environments than required by 3GPP conformance tests.
These results show that the multi-stage threshold method structured by utilizing multiple thresholds can show a high probability of PRACH preamble detection even in lower SNR environments than the conventional method in AWGN and TDL channels.