Rank order diversity detectors for wireless communications

A novel class of robust detectors, the rank order diversity (ROD) detectors, is proposed. The ROD detectors exploit the diversity inherent in any repetition code by sorting the sampled channel output, weighting each of the sorted samples according to their rank, and summing the weighted order statistics to form the test statistic. The ROD detectors subsume the globally optimal detectors for the short-tailed uniform and the normal distributions, as well as the locally optimal detector for the heavy-tailed double-exponential distribution, suggesting a high efficiency of the ROD detectors over a vast range of possible noise statistics. It is shown that for large sample sizes and under mild conditions on the noise statistics, the ROD detector achieves a probability of error less or equal than that of the linear detector with equality only for the normal distribution. The performance of the ROD detectors is illustrated in a DS-CDMA network