Exact analytical expression of Schmidl-Cox signal detection performance in AWGN

In this letter we investigate the performance of Schmidl-Cox signal detection, a widely used approach in practical OFDM systems whose performance is usually evinced by resorting to Gaussian approximations. We show that, by a slight modification of the normalization factor, we are able to derive a basically equivalent approach whose performance can be expressed in exact analytical form. A particularly simple expression is found for the false alarm probability, allowing system designers a straightforward selection of optimal parameters.