Digitally Phase Modulated (DPM) Signals

Some properties of digitally phase modulated (DPM) signals are presented. Phase modulation with (overlapping) pulses generated by a digital FIR filter belong to this class, which may be considered to be a practical approximation to continuous phase modulated (CPM) signals. The power spectra of DPM signals are derived analytically. The ability of these signals to operate through an additive white Gaussian noise channel is assessed by calculating their minimum Euclidean distance. Their noise and spectral properties are found to be similar to those of CPM signals. Assuming that a Viterbi decoder is used to resolve symbol interference, the out-of-band power tends to decrease as the pulse duration increases, and the noise immunity is enhanced. At the same time the receiver complexity grows exponentially. Hence, noise immunity and spectrum compactness are achieved at the cost of higher received complexity. Modems for DPM signals are believed to be easier to implement than those for CPM signals. This is because filter design is simple and a residual carrier component can be retained to facilitate carrier regeneration. Furthermore, the accumulated carrier phase does not need to be continuously evaluated in order to perform matched filtering. The analytic results derived are supported by measurements and simulations.