Soft-output demodulator in space-time-coded continuous phase modulation

Space-time coding has shown great promise for digital transmission in wireless communication links, especially when the channel response is known at the receiver. Space time coding combined with continuous phase modulation (CPM) can offer better tradeoffs in bandwidth and power efficiency. Because of the memory inherent in CPM, channel estimation is often harder than for linear modulations. We present an adaptive soft algorithm that performs joint channel estimation and data detection for space-time CPM systems. Properly designed pilot symbols are inserted at the very beginning to give good initial estimates of the channels. This soft receiver is further applied to the interleaved space-time CPM system to yield better performance with moderate complexity through iterative processing. Simulation results show that the receiver can often achieve near-coherent performance in quasistatic fading as well as in time-varying fading.