On the performance of correlation-based packet detection techniques

This work studies the performance of packet detection techniques in wireless systems where nodes transmit in a sporadic and asynchronous manner. Mod-elling a transmitter as a M/D/1 queue and focusing on a correlation-based approach, we derive exact expressions for the detection probability and false alarm rate at the receiver under AWGN conditions for any packet generation rate. Very tight approximations are also provided, and the performance of the correlator is compared to that of a likelihood-ratio-test solution. A significant aspect that has been frequently overlooked in literature is the necessity of addressing false alarms that may be caused by the data portion of sent messages. This factor has emerged in this work as a key consideration.