Optimum receiver based on single bit quantization

Nonlinear receiver architectures employing a limiting amplifier for analog-to-digital conversion are often applied in low-power wireless communications to reduce hardware complexity and power consumption. These advantages come at the cost of a degradation in performance compared to their linear counterparts. This work presents the optimum receiver for 1-bit quantized signals and provides the analytical relations for the resulting bit error rates (BER) for binary modulation schemes. The linear coherent matched filter receiver is shown to be optimal for 1-bit quantized receive signals in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Finally the BERs for binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) and binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation are analyzed exemplarily and the presented relations are confirmed by numerical simulation.