Splitting Receiver with Multiple Antennas

Abstract: Recently proposed splitting receivers, utilizing both coherently and non-coherently processed signals for detection, have demonstrated remarkable performance gain compared to conventional receivers in the single-antenna scenario. In this paper, we propose a multi-antenna splitting receiver, where the received signal at each antenna is split into an envelope detection (ED) branch and a coherent detection (CD) branch, and the processed signals from both branches of all antennas are then jointly utilized for recovering the transmitted information. We derive a closed-form approximation of the achievable mutual information (MI) in terms of the key receiver design parameters, including the power splitting ratio at each antenna and the signal combining coefficients from all the ED and CD branches. We further optimize these receiver design parameters and demonstrate important design insights for the proposed multi-antenna ED-CD splitting receiver: 1) the optimal splitting ratio is identical at each antenna, and 2) the optimal combining coefficients for the ED and CD branches are the same, and each coefficient is proportional to the corresponding antenna's channel power gain. Our numerical results also demonstrate the MI performance improvement of the proposed receiver over conventional non-splitting receivers.