A selective control information detection scheme for OFDM receivers

In wireless communications, both control information and payload (user-data) are concurrently transmitted and required to be successfully recovered. This paper focuses on block-level detection, which is applicable for detecting transmitted control information, particularly when this information is selected or chosen from a finite set of information that are known at both transmitting and receiving devices. Using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing architecture, this paper investigates and evaluates the performance of a time-domain decision criterion in comparison with a form of Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation method. Unlike the ML method, the proposed time-domain detection technique requires no channel estimation as it uses the correlation (in the time-domain) that exists between the received and the transmitted selective information as a means of detection. In comparison with the ML method, results show that the proposed method offers improved detection performance, particularly when the control information consists of at least 16. However, the implementation of the proposed method requires a slightly increased number of mathematical computations.