Abstract :
The optimum detectors for coherent and noncoherent reception of binary signals in additive Gaussian noise and the resuiting error probabilities were obtained by Helstrom [1]. In many practical communication systems a reasonable estimate of the phase of the received signal is available as the result of an auxiliary tracking operation of the carrier signal by a coherent tracking device such as a phase-locked loop. It is shown that the optimum detector for this case, which we refer to as partially coherent reception, is a linear combination of the correlation detector and the squared envelope correlation detector, which are optimum for the coherent and noncoherent cases, respectively. The error probabilities are also obtained as a function of the energy-to-noise ratio of the channel and the variance of the error in the phase estimate, which is a function of the signal-to-noise (SNR) in the tracking loop. The signal selection problem is considered in terms of these parameters.
