Large Zero Autocorrelation Zones of Golay Sequences and Their Applications

Golay sequences have been studied for more than five decades since Golay first discovered those sequences. However, the periodic autocorrelation of a single Golay sequence is unknown. In this paper, for H≥ 2 being an arbitrary even integer, we show there exist three different constructions of H-ary Golay sequences with a zero autocorrelation zone (ZACZ) of length approximately an half, a quarter or one eighth of their period. Those new discoveries on Golay sequences can be explored during synchronization and detection at the receiver end and thus improve the performance of the communication system. We present the application of binary Golay sequences with ZACZ for intersymbol interference (ISI) channel estimation. Compared with m-sequences, Golay-sequence-aided channel estimation has perfect autocorrelations within the zone. Compared with Frank-Zadoff-Chu sequences, Golay-sequence-aided channel estimation requires much lower hardware and computational complexity. We also discuss the performance of Golay-sequence-aided channel estimation in terms of its error variance. Finally, simulations are conducted to show the performance of our proposed scheme against m-sequences and FZC sequences in terms of symbol error rate. The simulations also confirm with our theoretical results.