Multiple-Symbol Detection Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4c MPSK Receivers over Slow Rayleigh Fading Channels

Although the full multiple-symbol detection (MSD) for IEEE 802.15.4c multiple phase shift keying (MPSK) receivers gives much better performance than the symbol-by-symbol detection (SBSD), its implementation complexity is extremely heavy. We propose a simple MSD scheme based on two implementation-friendly but powerful strategies. First, we find the best and second-best decisions in each symbol position with the standard SBSD procedure, and the global best decision is frozen. Second, for the remaining symbol positions, only the best and second-best symbol decisions, not all the candidates, are jointly searched by the standard MSD procedure. -e simulation results indicate that the packet error rate (PER) performance of the simplified MSD scheme is almost the same as that of the full scheme. In particular, at PER of 1 × 10 3, no more than 0.2 dB performance gap is observed if we just increase the observation window length N to 2. However, the number of decision metrics needed to be calculated is reduced from 256 to 2. -us, much balance gain between implementation complexity and detection performance is achieved.