Patent ID: 8542571

Claim:
A cell search apparatus in an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) cellular system in which a unique scrambling code is assigned to each cell, the cell search apparatus comprising: a sync acquirer acquiring synchronization of sync channel symbols using a sync channel of a forward link; and a group detector detecting at least one hopping codeword element belonging to a hopping codeword of a target cell from a forward link signal containing sync channel symbols sequence-hopped using the hopping codeword corresponding to a code group to which a scrambling code of the target cell belongs based on the acquired synchronization, and detecting the code group of the target cell based on the detected hopping codeword element, wherein the hopping codeword differs from a cyclically-shifted result of the hopping codeword, other hopping codewords used in the system, and cyclically-shifted results of the other hopping codewords.