An improved PCP signaling detector with reduced implementation complexity

An adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system, having precoded cyclic prefix (PCP) was proposed earlier as a way to carry the control signaling parameters to provide much needed flexible transmission techniques in cognitive radio (CR) communications. The ultimate goal of the PCP-OFDM system is to achieve concurrent transmission of CR control signaling parameters with data information. Therefore, hardware and computational efficient demodulation of PCP is of huge importance to recover the signaling parameters and for the design of fair spectrum sharing mechanism in cognitive radio scenario. But due to the hardware and computational complexity of the conventional optimal matched filter, recently a demodulator was proposed in paper which has reduced complexity than the conventional approach. However, the complexity is still high which is often very difficult to implement and also not cost-effective. In this paper, we propose a low complexity demodulator for the efficient demodulation of the signaling information carried by the PCPs. Design of this demodulator is presented and performance is evaluated through the simulations in different channel scenarios. Along with a peak combining technique, impact of the multipath impairment can be mitigated to a reasonable extent. More importantly, the hardware and computational complexity is reduced substantially compared with the other techniques proposed earlier. It is also found from the numerical simulation results that this demodulation scheme provides the same performance as the conventional optimal matched filter, with significantly reduced hardware and computational complexity, therefore reducing the overall complexity and cost of the PCP-OFDM receiver.