Integration and signal-to-noise ratio requirements for a signal processing system containing an ORing device

Often it is not feasible to display all the data produced by many signal processing systems. It is desired to reduce the amount of data displayed and to reduce the amount of hardware needed. One technique that provides a reduction of data is ORing, a process where one picks that single channel with the most energy. This paper provides an analysis of a system composed of square law detectors followed by accumulators, an ORing device, and a display. The required input SNR for the ORing device is determined for a detection probability of 0.5 and for false alarm probabilities of 10^-3, 10^-4, and 10^-6. The required input SNR is computed as a function of the number of channels ORed and the number of lines on the display. In addition, the number of samples in the accumulator required to achieve the desired input SNR for the ORing device is determined for various fixed input SNR´s to the square law detector. Finally, the ORing loss is computed as a function of the number of channels ORed and the number of lines on the display. It is concluded that the ORing loss increases with an increase in the integration on the display.