A Hybrid Differential Detection Scheme for the Ultra-Wideband Orientational Beamforming System

Differential space-time coding methods have been investigated for ultra-wideband communication systems to avoid channel estimation. However, their performance in the line-of-sight (LOS) environment is worse than the recently proposed orientational beamforming (OBF) system under low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). On the other hand, the OBF system cannot work well in the non-LOS (NLOS) environment. To address these issues, a hybrid differential detection (HDD) scheme is proposed in this paper, which combines the OBF system with a proposed differential OBF (DOBF) system. First, the DOBF system with a fully differential detection scheme is proposed, whose performance is almost the same as the differential space-time block coding method. However, its detection complexity only linearly increases with the number of transmitting antennas. Then, the HDD scheme is proposed, with its decision statistic being a combination of a modified OBF decision statistic and the DOBF decision statistic. In the NLOS environment, the HDD scheme is reduced to the DOBF system. In the LOS environment, a combination coefficient is obtained by mapping an SNR-related factor through a sigmoid function. The optimal parameters for the sigmoid function are determined through simulations, with which the proposed HDD scheme can achieve overall better performance than the OBF and DOBF systems.