Robust detection with the gap metric

In a multipath communication channel, the optimal receiver is matched to the maximum likelihood (ML) estimate of the multipath signal. In general, this leads to a computationally intensive multidimensional nonlinear optimization problem that is not feasible in most applications. We develop a detection algorithm that avoids finding the ML estimates of the channel parameters while still achieving good performance. Our approach is based on a geometric interpretation of the multipath detection problem. The ML estimate of the multipath signal is the orthogonal projection of the received signal on a suitable signal subspace S. We design a second subspace G, which is the representation subspace, that is close to S but whose orthogonal projection is easily computed. The closeness is measured by the gap metric. The subspace G is designed by using wavelet analysis tools coupled with a reshaping algorithm in the Zak transform domain. We show examples where our approach significantly outperforms the conventional correlator receiver (CR) and other alternative suboptimal detectors.