Detection of Single vs Multiple Antenna Transmission Systems Using Pilot Data

In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying the transmission system when it is not known a priori whether the transmission is via a single antenna or multiple antennas. The receiver is assumed to be employed with a known number of antennas. In a data frame transmitted by most multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, some pilot or training data is inserted for symbol timing synchronization and estimation of the channel. Our goal is to perform MIMO transmit antenna classification using this pilot data. More specifically, the problem of determining the transmission system is cast as a multiple hypothesis testing problem where the number of hypotheses is equal to the maximum number of transmit antennas. Under the assumption of receiver having the exact knowledge of pilot data used for timing synchronization and channel estimation, we consider maximum likelihood (ML) and correlation test statistics to classify the MIMO transmit system. When only probabilistic knowledge of pilot data is available at the receiver, a hybrid-maximum likelihood (HML) based test statistic is constructed using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithms is illustrated via simulations and comparative merits of different techniques in terms of the computational complexity and performance are discussed.