GLRT Approach for Robust Burst Packet Acquisition in Wireless Communications

Rapid detection of the arrival of a packet is challenging in burst wireless communications, where many parameters are unknown, such as signal power, noise power and carrier phase offset. Due to the unknown noise power, it is hard to set appropriate thresholds for the existing common detectors under the Neyman-Pearson criterion, which results in vulnerable acquisition and poor performance. In order to solve this problem, we propose the generalized likelihood-ratio test (GLRT) approach for sequence-aided packet acquisition in this paper. GLRT detection is formulated under multipath channel. Moreover, false alarm probability and detection probability of GLRT are derived and confirmed via simulations. Comparisons are conducted between GLRT and the common detectors, as well as GLRT under different channels. Results show that GLRT basically reveals more competitive and robust performance than the common detectors in practice, with only a little extra hardware cost by using the provided recursive computation structure. Additionally, it is shown that fading results in significant deterioration for GLRT; whereas GLRT has ability to exploit multipath diversity to reduce fading effect and improve acquisition performance.