Averaging and oversampling correlator receiver with input quantization

Correlation is a fundamental technique to detect signals buried in noise. However, due to noise, the fluctuations of the output signal may be significant and the detection of the desired signal can then fail. It is known that a simple one-bit correlator receiver can give nearly identical performance to the full precision correlator in determining time delays in medium signal-to-noise ratio situations, when averaging several successive correlation signals. An oversampled and averaged version of the correlator, with input quantization to a low number of bits, is studied here using simulation. It is demonstrated that, by oversampling the received signal at a multiple of the correlation code clock rate and averaging over several successive samples, performance similar to that of the full precision correlator may be attained to in low SNR situations.