Symbol Detection Using an Integrate-and-Fire Time Encoding Receiver

Abstract: Event-driven sampling is a promising alternative to uniform sampling methods, particularly for systems constrained by power and hardware cost. A notable example of this sampling approach is the integrate-and-fire time encoding machine (IF-TEM), which encodes an analog signal into a sequence of time stamps by generating an event each time the integral of the input signal reaches a fixed threshold. In this paper, we propose a receiver architecture that estimates the sequence of transmitted symbols directly from the encoded time stamps, called time encodings, produced by the IF-TEM sampler on the received signal. We show that waveform reconstruction from time encodings is not necessary for symbol detection. We develop an analytical approximation for the symbol error probability (SEP) of the proposed IF-TEM-based receiver and show that it closely matches the SEP results obtained through Monte Carlo simulations. Additionally, we demonstrate that narrowing the 3 dB bandwidth of the transmit pulse shaping filter degrades the proposed IF-TEM receiver's performance, highlighting a trade-off between spectral efficiency and error resilience.