Blind acquisition of short burst with per-survivor processing

In this paper, the blind acquisition performance of PSP (per-survivor processing) is discussed. The problematic sequences for any joint ML data and channel estimator are characterized from an analytic perspective. Based on the theory of indistinguishable sequences, modifications to conventional PSP are suggested that improve its acquisition performance significantly. The effects of tree search and list-based algorithms on PSP are also discussed. The proposed improvement techniques are compared for different channels. The blind acquisition techniques described here can be used for other applications like multi-user detection or space-time trellis codes.