GLRT signal detection performance of a synthetic array

A mobile station (MS) antenna is typically undergoing random spatial motion as part of the typical usage which degrades the coherency of the received signal resulting in demodulation losses. However, in a fading environment, the random motion can be constructively exploited in a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) processing scheme resulting in diversity gain. The key outcome is the observation that the optimum velocity of the antenna is directly proportional to the product of the spatial coherence length and the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the antenna output. It is also shown that the performance degradation due to the unknown velocity of the moving antenna, which is jointly estimated by the GLRT scheme is negligible.