MOCZ for Blind Short-Packet Communication: Basic Principles

Abstract

We introduce a novel blind (noncoherent) communication scheme, called modulation on conjugate-reciprocal zeros (MOCZ), pronounced as “Moxie,” to reliably transmit sporadic short-packets over unknown wireless multipath channels. In MOCZ, the information is modulated onto the zeros of the transmitted discrete-time baseband signal’s $z-$ transform, which yields to a codebook of non-orthogonal signals. In the absence of additive noise, the zero structure of the signal is perfectly preserved at the receiver, no matter what the channel impulse response (CIR) is. Furthermore, by a proper selection of the zeros, we show that MOCZ is not only invariant to the CIR but also robust against additive noise. Starting with the maximum-likelihood estimator, we define a low complexity and reliable decoder and compare it to various state-of-the-art noncoherent multipath schemes, such as OFDM index-modulation (IM), OFDM pilot-aided, OFDM differential-modulation, and pulse-position-modulation. Our scheme outperforms all schemes and maintains its performance even if the length becomes shorter than the CIR.