Multipath interference detector design for digital data transmission

In this paper, the effects of multipath transmission interference on a digital communication system is investigated. The channel model for multipath transmission consists of a direct transmission path from the transmitter to the receiver and subchannels corresponding to signals being reflected from the ground plane are included. The output of these subchannels are then recombined in a proper fashion to achieve a better performance. The received signal is modeled as the sum of signals (direct and reflected) having a fading amplitude, an incoherent phase, an attenuation, and a delay due to longer transmission paths. The number of subpaths are optimized to provide maximum improvement, i.e., the detector design is based on the Bayes criterion with a minimum probability of error for a given signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, the detector performance is evaluated in terms of the receiver operating characteristics curves for different signal-to-noise ratio levels.