Sensitivity Analysis of Finite-Lag Receivers

This paper presents the sensitivity analysis of a class of receivers called finite-lag receivers, introduced by the authors in [1] through [3]. Since these receivers are based on the use of fixed-lag smoothing techniques, algorithms for the calculation of large-scale and small-scale sensitivities of fixed-lag smoothing are derived using a state augmentation approach. Steady-state analysis of these algorithms shows that an explicit relation can be obtained between sensitivity coefficients of fixed-lag smoothing and filtering. The specific case of sensitivity to variations in the measurement (channel) noise is considered as an example. These results are applied to study the sensitivity performance of the finite-lag receivers for analog communication. It is shown, for example, that finite-lag receivers for AM signals, besides being superior in performance [1]-[3], [11], in terms of output SNR or error variance, are also much less sensitive to the additive noise power level, compared to zero-lag receivers.