The Cost of Noncoherence: Avoiding Channel Estimation Through Differential Encoding in Phase Quantized Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach that utilizes differential encoding to overcome the channel estimation problem in communication systems with low-resolution quantization receivers. For differentially encoded data, we derive the maximum likelihood detection rule for the canonical block-2 detectors, employing just two consecutive quantized observations at the channel output and without any receiver-side channel state information. We establish the optimality of this maximum likelihood detection rule within the class of block- L detectors, where L ≥ 3 , under the condition that n = log 2 M , with n and M denoting the number of quantization bits and input alphabet size, respectively. The deri..