 made to search the next cell. From the standpoint of functional oper- ation, these two systems are identical. Hence, in what follows we shall not draw any distinction between the two. In addition to all of the foregoing, one must, as in the single dwell case, characterize the penalty time Tp for a false alarm. this occurs when all N detector outputs exceed their respective thresholds for a cell which does not correspond to the correct code alignment. Regardless of the means for iden- tifying the false alarm (we shall discuss some of these toward the end of the chapter), it is convenient to model Tp as an integer multiple of the additional time required by the N-th dwell, i.e., (1.01) 1.3.1 Markov Chain Acquisition Model The procedure for evaluating acquisition performance of the N-dwell sys- tem is to once again determine a suitable flow graph model for the process which when reduced results in the system generating function. Since the cell- to-cell or inter-cell behavior of the N-dwell system is identical to that of the single dwell system, one should expect that the generating function flow graphs for the two systems would have the same macroscopic (coarse) struc- ture. This realization enables one to immediately use the structure of Figure 1.8 for the flow graph representation of the N-dwell system which is illus- trated in Figure 1.17. The microscopic (fine) structure of each of the branches in Figure 1.17 which depicts the intra-cell behavior of the N-dwell process, is represented by the series of exploded flow graphs in Figure 1.18. Analogous to Figure 1.8, each branch is labelled with the product of the transition probability associated with going from the node at the originating end of the branch to the node at its determinating end, and an integer (including zero) power of a parameter Zi; i = 1, 2, N. As before, the parameter Zi is used to indi- cate the unit time delay as flow propagates along that branch and its power represents the number of such time delay units. Since Figures 1.17 and 1.18 are to b