# On the Performance of Splitting Receiver with Joint Coherent and Non-Coherent Processing

## TL;DR

This paper revises the performance analysis of the splitting receiver, showing it offers a constant data rate gain over traditional designs when antenna noise is considered, correcting previous overestimations.

## Contribution

It introduces an improved signal model for the splitting receiver, providing a more accurate performance analysis that corrects prior overestimations of its data rate gains.

## Key findings

- Splitting receiver offers a constant data rate gain at high SNR with antenna noise included.
- Derived a low-complexity detection rule for practical modulation schemes.
- Numerical results highlight conditions for significant performance gains.

## Abstract

In this paper, we revisit a recently proposed receiver design, named the splitting receiver, which jointly uses coherent and non-coherent processing for signal detection. By considering an improved signal model for the splitting receiver as compared to the original study in the literature, we conduct a performance analysis on the achievable data rate under Gaussian signaling and obtain a fundamentally different result on the performance gain of the splitting receiver over traditional receiver designs that use either coherent or non-coherent processing alone. Specifically, the original study ignored the antenna noise and concluded on a 50% gain in achievable data rate in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In contrast, we include the antenna noise in the signal model and show that the splitting receiver improves the achievable data rate by a constant gap in the high SNR regime. This represents an important correction of the theoretical understanding on the performance of the splitting receiver. In addition, we examine the maximum-likelihood detection and derive a low-complexity detection rule for the splitting receiver for practical modulation schemes. Our numerical results give further insights into the conditions under which the splitting receiver achieves significant gains in terms of either achievable data rate or detection error probability.