On the implementation and performance of single and double differential detection schemes

A variety of schemes for performing differential detection in environments characterized by frequency offset are discussed. All of the schemes involve encoding the input phase information as a second-order difference and performing an analogous second-order differential detection at the receiver. Because of the back-to-back differential detection operations at the receiver, The performance of most of the schemes is considerably degraded relative to that of first-order differential detection schemes. However, the latter are quite sensitive to frequency offset and, in many instances, cannot be used at all. It is demonstrated that via a simple enhancement of using a 2 T s (instead of T s) delay in the second stage of the encoder and first stage of the decoder, the performance degradation can be significantly reduced. This result is significant in view of the fact that it comes without any penalty in implementation complexity