Non-coherent sequence detection scheme for satellite-based automatic identification system

The satellite-based automatic identification system (AIS) receiver has to encounter the frequency offset caused by the Doppler effect and the oscillator instability. This paper proposes a non-coherent sequence detection scheme for the satellite-based AIS signal transmitted over the white Gaussian noise channel. Based on the maximum likelihood estimation and a Viterbi decoder, the proposed scheme is capable of tolerating a frequency offset up to 5% of the symbol rate. The complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced by the state-complexity reduction, which is based on per-survivor processing. Simulation results prove that the proposed non-coherent sequence detection scheme has high robustness to frequency offset compared to the relative scheme when messages collision exists.