Optimal invariant detection of a monochromatic plane wave with unknown amplitude, frequency, phase, direction of arrival and noise variance

This study deals with the problem of detecting a monochromatic plane wave with unknown amplitude, phase, temporal frequency and direction of arrival in complex white Gaussian noise with unknown variance. Depending on the natural invariance in scale, temporal modulation and spatial modulation of the problem, the uniformly most powerful invariant (UMPI) test is derived by using the statistical invariance principles. However, the UMPI test does not apply unless the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is known. However, it provides us with performance bound to evaluate any invariant test´s performance when the SNR is unknown. Typically, the generalised likelihood ratio test (GLRT) and locally most powerful invariant (LMPI) test are derived as realisable suboptimal invariant tests with their performance comparison in different SNR through theoretical analysis. Computer simulation examples corroborate the authors analysis and indicate that the GLRT is close to the UMPI bound especially in the low probability-of-false-alarm (P_FA) region of the receiver operating characteristic curve while the performance of the LMPI test is close to that of the UMPI test in the low SNR region.