Reduction of the error floor of binary FSK by nonlinear frequency discriminators

We consider the error floor of binary frequency-shift keying (FSK) due to intersymbol interference in time-dispersive mobile radio channels, with a limiter-discriminator-integrator detector. The errors are caused by bursts in the instantaneous frequency. We propose and verify that a nonlinear frequency discriminator can achieve zero error floor for pure FSK by clipping off these bursts. For filtered FSK, the error floor is not completely removed, but strongly reduced - typically by one or two orders of magnitude. The tighter the filtering, the less effective this nonlinearity is. The nonlinear discriminator can also be used in conjunction with adaptive sampling.