The general unknown parameter receiver

We develop a general receiver for the detection of data in the presence of additive noise and other channel impairments. These impairments may be any channel effect which introduces unknown, possibly random parameters into the received signal. These include phase offset, frequency offset, complex channel gain, intersymbol interference, or any combination thereof. The proposed receiver uses a structure based on parallel processing; m demodulators are placed in parallel, followed by a decision unit which makes selections from the m demodulator outputs. We detail the components of this receiver for some important channels. Using an illustrative example, we demonstrate the ability of this receiver to achieve a performance closely matching optimal, while maintaining a low complexity.