Non-coherent detectors for quadrature-multiplexed continuous phase modulation signals

Here, non-coherent detectors for quadrature-multiplexed continuous phase modulation (QM-CPM) signals are developed (Fonseka et al., 2008). QM-CPM signals are more spectrally efficient than CPM signals, and multiamplitude QM-CPM signals can be constructed that outperform QAM. The non-coherent detectors view a QM-CPM signal as having composite states that represent the information modulated both onto the in-phase and quadrature-phase carriers. Viterbi decoding is used to jointly detect the quadrature-multiplexed signal components. Optimal sequence-based quadrature-matched filter (QMF) detectors are presented for use with QM-CPM detection and a QM-MSK detector is developed in detail. Differential phase and envelope (DPE) detectors are also presented which require less computation and are able to outperform the QMF-type detectors when the unknown carrier phase varies (phase jitter, phase hits etc.) within the sequence length used in the sequence-based QMF detectors. In the absence of these phase fluctuation effects, as the sequence length used in the QMF detectors increases, the performance of the QMF detectors approaches the performance of optimal non-coherent detection. The DPE-type detectors perform within about 2.5 dB of optimal coherent detection.