Noncoherent block detection in the presence of DC offset

In this paper, we deal with noncoherent detection of a digitally phasor block-modulated signal in the additive white Gaussian noise channel when a direct-current (DC) offset is present in the receiver baseband processing. By processing the received baseband signal block by block, a generalized linear transform is used to remove the offset prior to data detection, thereby releasing the succeeding detection process from the threat of DC offset. Operating on transform output blocks, a generalized maximum-likelihood scheme is developed for noncoherent data detection without a priori knowledge of channel amplitude and phase. When all the signaling blocks are confined within the space expanded by the basis vectors obtained from the onset-removal transform matrix, the proposed detection scheme can exploit the advantage of performing data detection and estimation on channel amplitude and phase jointly in the maximum-likelihood sense. It is analytically shown that the block detection scheme provides the bit error performance asymptotically approaching that of the corresponding ideal coherent phase-shift-keyed (PSK) detection in the absence of DC offset when the block length is increased. An iterative detection scheme is also modified from the block detection scheme to simplify the realization complexity. Both block and iterative detection schemes are shown to outperform the conventional training-sequence-aided PSK detection scheme under the same transmission throughput efficiency.