Limiting Moments of Autocorrelation Demerit Factors of Binary Sequences

An aperiodic binary sequence of length $\ell$ is written as $f=\ldots,f_{-1},f_0,f_1,\ldots$ with $f_j \in \{-1,1\}$ when $0 \leq j < \ell$ and and $f_j=0$ otherwise. Various problems in engineering and natural science demand binary sequences that do not resemble translates of themselves. The autocorrelation of $f$ at shift $s$ is the inner product of $f$ with the sequence obtained by translating $f$ by $s$ places. The demerit factor of $f$ is the sum of the squares of the autocorrelations at all nonzero shifts for the sequence obtained by normalizing $f$ to unit Euclidean norm. Low demerit factor therefore indicates low self-similarity under translation. We endow the $2^\ell$ binary sequences of length $\ell$ with uniform probability measure and consider the distribution of their demerit factors. Earlier works used combinatorial techniques to find exact formulas for the mean, variance, and skewness of the distribution as a function of $\ell$. These revealed that for $\ell \geq 4$, the $p$th central moment of this distribution is positive for every $p \geq 2$. This article shows that every $p$th central moment is a quasi-polynomial function of $\ell$ with rational coefficients divided by $\ell^{2 p}$. It also shows that, in the limit as $\ell$ tends to infinity, the $p$th standardized moment is the same as that of the standard normal distribution.

Moments of Autocorrelation Demerit Factors of Binary Sequences

Sequences with low aperiodic autocorrelation are used in communications and remote sensing for synchronization and ranging. The autocorrelation demerit factor of a sequence is the sum of the squared magnitudes of its autocorrelation values at every nonzero shift when we normalize the sequence to have unit Euclidean length. The merit factor, introduced by Golay, is the reciprocal of the demerit factor. We consider the uniform probability measure on the $2^\ell$ binary sequences of length $\ell$ and investigate the distribution of the demerit factors of these sequences. Previous researchers have calculated the mean and variance of this distribution. We develop new combinatorial techniques to calculate the $p$th central moment of the demerit factor for binary sequences of length $\ell$. These techniques prove that for $p\geq 2$ and $\ell \geq 4$, all the central moments are strictly positive. For any given $p$, one may use the technique to obtain an exact formula for the $p$th central moment of the demerit factor as a function of the length $\ell$. The previously obtained formula for variance is confirmed by our technique with a short calculation, and we demonstrate that our techniques go beyond this by also deriving an exact formula for the skewness.