On the maximum likelihood detection of DAPSK signaling

This paper considers the maximum likelihood (ML) detection of 16-ary differential amplitude and phase shift keying (DAPSK) in Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the conditional likelihood function, two new receiver structures, namely the ML symbol-by-symbol receiver and ML sequence receiver, are proposed. For the symbol-by-symbol detection, the conventional DAPSK detector is shown to be sub-optimal due to the complete separation in the phase and amplitude detection, but it results in very close performance to the ML detector provided that its circular amplitude decision thresholds are optimized. For the sequence detection, a simple Viterbi algorithm with only two states are adopted to provide an SNR gain around 1 dB on the amplitude bit detection compared with the conventional detector.