Estimation of interleaver period for unknown signals

An interleaving technique is commonly used in digital wireless communications systems to improve robustness against burst errors. The structure of the interleaver must be known at the receiver side, however, for a non-cooperative context, we cannot know the structure. Therefore, for the detection of an unknown signal, the blind estimation of the parameters of the interleaver is required. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the estimation of an interleaver period for an unknown signal by using a statistical analysis of the interleaved data for the linearity of the linear block code.