A Quaternion-Based Approach to Construct Quaternary Periodic Complementary Pairs

Two arrays form a periodic complementary pair if the sum of their periodic autocorrelations is a delta function. Finding such pairs, however, is challenging for large arrays whose entries are constrained to a small alphabet. One such alphabet is the quaternary set which contains the complex fourth roots of unity. In this letter, we propose a technique to construct periodic complementary pairs defined over the quaternary set using perfect quaternion arrays. We show how new pairs of quaternary sequences, matrices, and four-dimensional arrays that satisfy a periodic complementary property can be constructed with our method.