Optimum Receiver Design for Broadband Doppler Compensation in Multipath/Doppler Channels With Rational Orthogonal Wavelet Signaling

In this paper, we address the issue of signal transmission and Doppler compensation in multipath/Doppler channels. Based on a wavelet-based broadband Doppler compensation structure, this paper presents the design and performance characterization of optimum receivers for this class of communication systems. The wavelet-based Doppler compensation structure takes account of the coexistence of multiple Doppler scales in a multipath/Doppler channel and captures the information carried by multiple scaled replicas of the transmitted signal rather than an estimation of an average Doppler as in conventional Doppler compensation schemes. The transmitted signal is recovered by the perfect reconstruction (PR) wavelet analysis filter bank (FB). We demonstrate that with rational orthogonal wavelet signaling, the proposed communication structure corresponds to a Lth-order diversity system, where L is the number of dominant transmission paths. Two receiver designs for pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) signal transmission are presented. Both receiver designs are optimal under the maximum-likelihood (ML) criterion for diversity combination and symbol detection. Good performance is achieved for both receivers in combating the Doppler effect and intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by multipath while mitigating the channel noise. In particular, the second receiver design overcomes symbol timing sensitivities present in the first design at reasonable cost to performance.