The cost-performance tradeoffs in ADCs are well known, and economic considerations at low end devices often necessitate a one bit quantization of the input samples. Taking a single bit view of the incoming IF samples as well as the local oscillator outputs of a communication receiver, we consider the problem of frequency and phase discrimination. While conventional wisdom suggests large oversampling to compensate for the lack of precision, we show that this is not necessary. More specifically, a connection between frequency offset and the accumulated one bit samples after the mixing stage is established, by appealing to Fourier analysis. The development also permits a simple closed form approximation of the frequency offset in terms of the available samples. Numerical simulations demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed discriminators across varying SNRs. Based on the joint work with Anil Kumar Yadav and Kumar Appaiah, IITB.
Sibi Raj B Pillai is a faculty at the Electrical Engineering department of IIT Bombay. He received PhD in computer science and communications from EPFL Switzerland in 2007, and was a research fellow at the University of Melbourne till 2009. His main research interest is in applying information theory to multi-user systems, feedback communications and biological systems. He is also interested in radar signal processing, satellite navigation, and software radio prototyping of communication systems.