Improved noncoherent receiver for joint range and symbol estimation

Abstract

The noncoherent receiver (NCR) has, recently, gained importance due to its simple design and low-complexity for the internet of things and wireless communications. However, NCR's performance is sub-optimal as compared to a coherent receiver due to the presence of noise. In this paper, we propose an NCR for joint ranging and data symbol estimation for pulse-based communication such as ultra-wideband and terahertz band communication. The proposed NCRs (referred as pulse autocorrelation NCR (PA-NCR) and iterative PA-NCR (IPA-NCR)) utilize apriori information about the transmitted pulse and channel statistics for enhancing the system's signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed IPA-NCR's performance is improved using an iterative algorithm for a block-wise data symbol detection and ranging estimation, while considering the channel to be static during the block length. The PA-NCR and IPA-NCR are the best choice for fast varying (i.e. vehicular communication) and slow varying (i.e. indoor communication) channels respectively. Performance of the proposed NCR is analyzed over standard IEEE 802.15.4a channels and is also compared with some existing NCRs. © 2018 IEEE.