An analytical series expansion solution to the problem of noncoherent detection

The well-known noncoherent detection problem concerns optimal detection of an amplitude-modulated sinusoid, with an unknown phase angle, corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. The classical solution to this problem is the noncoherent detector which is known to be optimal if the envelope belongs to a specific set of functions or satisfies the narrow-band approximation i.e., that the bandwidth of the envelope is narrow in comparison with the (carrier) frequency of the sinusoid. In this work, an analytical series expansion solution to the likelihood ratio for the noncoherent detection problem is derived. This solution offers a generalization of the noncoherent detector in which the conditions imposed on the envelope stated above have been relaxed. Analytical expressions for the joint probability density functions (pdfs) of the in-phase and quadrature components, jointly expressed in polar coordinates, are also derived under the signal-plus-noise and the noise-only hypotheses, respectively. Numerical simulations of the detector performance are presented in the form of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and minimum probability of error curves. The results from a comparison of the general analytical solution with the classical noncoherent detector show significant differences between the two detectors when the narrow-band approximation does not hold.