NONCOHERENT AND DIFFERENTIAL DETECTION OF FQPSK WITH MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD SEQUENCE ESTIMATION IN NONLINEAR CHANNELS

Abstract

This paper presents noncoherent limiter-discriminator detection and differential detection of FQPSK (Feher quadrature phase-shift-keying) with maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) techniques. Noncoherent FQPSK systems are suitable for fast fading and cochannel interference channels and channels with strong phase noise, and they can offer faster synchronization and reduce outage events compared with conventional coherent systems. In this paper, both differential detection and limiter-discriminator detection of FQPSK are discussed. We use MLSE with lookup tables to exploit the memory in noncoherently detected FQPSK signals and thus significantly improve the bit error rate (BER) performance in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.