International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A new class of non-coherent detection techniques for recently standardized Feher patented quadrature phase-shift keying (FQPSK) systems is proposed and studied by computer aided design/simulations and also verified by experimental hardware measurements. The theoretical concepts of the described non-coherent techniques are based on an interpretation of the instantaneous frequency deviation or phase transition characteristics of FQPSK-B modulated signal at the front end of the receiver. These are accomplished either by Limiter-Discriminator (LD) or by Limiter-Discriminator followed by Integrate-and-Dump (LD I&D) methods. It is shown that significant BER performance improvements can be obtained by increasing the received signal’s observation time over multiple symbols as well as by adopting trellis-demodulation. For example, our simulation results show that a BER=10^-4 can be obtained for an E(b)/N(0)=12.7 dB.

In this thesis, noncoherent differential demodulation of CPM signals with joint carrier frequency offset and symbol timing estimation is investigated. CPM is very attractive for wireless communications owing to major properties: good spectral efficiency and a constant envelope property. In order to demodulate the received CPM signal differentially, the symbol timing and the carrier frequency offset have to be estimated accurately. There are numerous methods developed for the purpose. However, we have not encountered studies (which are based on autocorrelation estimation and hence suitable for blind synchronization) that give expectable performance for both M-ary and partial response signaling. Thus, in this thesis we analyze a feedforward blind estimation scheme, which recovers the symbol timing and the frequency offset of M-ary CPM signals and partial response CPM signals. In addition, we surveyed low complexity symbol detection methods for CPM signals. Reduced state Viterbi differential detector incorporated to the joint frequency offset and symbol timing estimator is also examined. The performance of the examined demodulator scheme is assessed for the AWGN channel by computer simulations.