In this paper, we propose a hypothesis testing based sequential frame synchronization technique that is robust against fluctuations and imperfect estimation of channel gain at the receiver. The proposed detector uses division in the decision rule to cancel the effect of channel gain, and therefore is called division based hypothesis testing (DHT). We show that the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of DHT is close to the optimal likelihood ratio test (LRT), while the optimal LRT requires perfect knowledge of noise and channel gain at the receiver. Further, we use three performance metrics, namely, the probability of false synchronization P fs , average reception duration l rx , and probability of missed synchronization P ms , to compare the performance of hypothesis testing against that of point estimation. We analytically show that hypothesis testing can have better reliability and lower energy consumption than point estimation if the probability of false alarm of the hypothesis testing is lower than the minimum of two thresholds. The cost of hypothesis testing is an arbitrarily small P ms while point estimation can have zero P ms . A modified implementation of hypothesis testing is also introduced to further reduce the energy consumption.Index Terms-Frame synchronization, hypothesis testing, sync word detection, division based hypothesis testing, likelihood ratio test, point estimation, enhanced WWVB broadcast.
0090-6778Yingsi Liang (M'14) received the B.E. degree in communication engineering from South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, in 2008, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Her research has resulted in major contributions to the design of the enhanced WWVB broadcast, which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has deployed in 2012, as well as to the development of the EverSet ® receiver technology for this broadcast. Her research interests include wireline and wireless communication systems, synchronization, channel coding, interference mitigation, and digital signal processing. Dinesh Rajan (S'99-M'02-SM'07) received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, Chennai, India, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University, Houston, TX, USA, in the areas of electrical and computer engineering. He is currently Department Chair and Cecil and Ida Green Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. His current research interests include communications theory, wireless networks, information theory and computational imaging. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for his work on applying information theory to the design of mobile wireless networks. Oren E. Eliezer (M'98-SM'14) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1988 and 1996, respectively, majoring in communication theory, digital si...