On orthogonal signaling over the slow nonselective Rician fading channel with unknown specular component

Orthogonal signaling over the slow nonselective Rician fading channel is considered. Previous receiver designs have all assumed the amplitude and phase of the specular component of the received carrier to be known completely, but this assumption is entirely unrealistic. The problem is reformulated with unknown random amplitude and phase of the specular component. The optimum maximum likelihood receiver is obtained for equally likely equal-energy orthogonal signals and is shown to be identical to the quadratic receiver for the purely unknown phase channel and the pure Rayleigh fading channel. The error probability performance is analyzed for a fixed known specular amplitude. When specialized to the binary signaling case this error probability result exhibits a performance that is very close to and asymptotically approaches that of the conventional coherent-specular-component case for high SNR. Thus, knowledge of the specular component phase is not important to the optimum receiver