Asynchronous Communication over a Fading Channel and Additive Noise

In \cite{Chandar2008}, Chandar et al studied a problem of sequential frame synchronization for a frame transmitted randomly and uniformly among $A$ slots. For a discrete memory-less channel (DMC), they showed that the frame length $N$ must scale as $e^{\alpha(Q)N}>A$ for the frame detection error to go to zero asymptotically with $A$. $\alpha(Q)$ is the synchronization threshold and $Q$ is channel transition probability. We study the sequential frame synchronisation problem for a fading channel and additive noise and seek to characterise the effect of fading. For a discrete ON-OFF fading channel (with ON probability $p$) and additive noise (with channel transition probabilities $Q_n$), we characterise the synchronisation threshold of the composite channel $\alpha(Q)$ and show that $\alpha(Q)\leq p\,\alpha(Q_n)$. We then characterize the synchronization threshold for Rayleigh fading and AWGN channel as a function of channel parameters. The asynchronous framework permits a trade-off between sync frame length, $N$, and channel, $Q$, to support asynchronism. This allows us to characterize the synchronization threshold with sync frame energy instead of sync frame length.