Comparing the Performance of a Matched Filter and Majority Voting to Cope with Harsh Electromagnetic Disturbances

This paper compares the effectiveness of two techniques that can be implemented at the receiver side in digital communication channels to cope with harsh EMI. The techniques are applying majority voting or a matched filter to the same oversampled values of the receiving encoded bit stream. After applying one of both techniques, the determined bits are compared with the bits that were originally sent and a bit-error-rate is calculated. The filter or voter gain, which is the difference in signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve the same bit-error-rate, is used as metric to quantify the performance of both techniques. The numerical results show that using a matched filter results in a higher gain than using any majority voting technique. However, using the majority voting technique allows the receiving end to have an idea if something went wrong, allowing the system to perform a safety procedure.