Multiple-Symbol Detection Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4c MPSK Receivers over Slow Rayleigh Fading Channels

Abstract

Although the full multiple-symbol detection (MSD) for IEEE 802.15.4c multiple phase shift keying (MPSK) receivers gives much better performance than the symbol-by-symbol detection (SBSD), its implementation complexity is extremely heavy. We propose a simple MSD scheme based on two implementation-friendly but powerful strategies. First, we find the best and second-best decisions in each symbol position with the standard SBSD procedure, and the global best decision is frozen. Second, for the remaining symbol positions, only the best and second-best symbol decisions, not all the candidates, are jointly searched by the standard MSD procedure. The simulation results indicate that the packet error rate (PER) performance of the simplified MSD scheme is almost the same as that of the full scheme. In particular, at PER of $1\times {10}^{-3}$ , no more than 0.2 dB performance gap is observed if we just increase the observation window length $N$ to 2. However, the number of decision metrics needed to be calculated is reduced from 256 to 2. Thus, much balance gain between implementation complexity and detection performance is achieved.