A New Multiple-Symbol Differential Detection Strategy for Error-Floor Elimination of IEEE 802.15.4 BPSK Receivers Impaired by Carrier Frequency Offset

In this paper, we pay our attention towards the noncoherent demodulation aspect of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) receivers for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and a carrier frequency offset invariant as well as error-floor free multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) strategy is proposed over the flat fading channel. This detector is an alternative to the multiple-symbol detector that has been considered almost exclusively in the past. In this new configuration, the receivers do not perform chip-level precompensation as in conventional scheme but bit-level postcompensation. That is, the bit-level autocorrelation operation is first implemented with the “raw” chip sample, and then the carrier frequency offset effect (CFOE) embedded in the achieved statistic is compensated. Correspondingly, the cumulative error in the detection metric is decreased so much that the pervasive error floor for the conventional MSDD scheme is suppressed. Also, complexity efficient estimators for the MSDD scheme are reinvestigated, analyzed, and summarized. Simulation results demonstrate that this new detection strategy may achieve rather more encouraging gain from differential and spread spectrum coding than the conventional single differential coherent detection (SDCD) scheme. The pervasive error floor is also eliminated as compared with conventional MSDD scheme even if the most simple estimator is configured under large bit observation length. Then, much transmitting energy may be saved for each chip symbol, which is practically desired for transmit-only nodes in WSNs.