Performance analysis of the incoherent and skewness matched filter detectors in multipath environments

For cases in which a received signal is known exactly and the additive noise is white and Gaussian, the optimal detector can be implemented as a matched filter followed by a threshold comparator. However, the performance of this detector is sensitive to signal shifts and mismatch between the assumed and the actual structure of the received signal. As such, the use of a matched filter detector in a multipath environment can result in substantially poorer performance than expected. Here, it is shown that the use of the incoherent (or sliding) matched filter can also result in a substantial performance loss if the signal autocorrelation function is narrow relative to the interarrival times of the pulses. In contrast, a detector that compares the zero-zero lag of the matched filter cumulant sequence to a threshold has a performance that is relatively insensitive to multipath channels