Noncoherent block demodulation of MSK with inherent and enhanced encoding

It is shown that there is a close relation between known noncoherent minimum shift keying (MSK) demodulation structures, such as envelope and differential receivers, and schemes derived from the noncoherent maximum-likelihood block estimation (N-MLBE) principle. When the observation interval is increased, the performance of MSK with N-MLBE tends to that of binary coherently detected orthogonal binary frequency shift keying. A new demodulation strategy, reduced block noncoherent estimation (RBNE), is introduced and shown to improve the performance of noncoherent MSK, beyond that of coherently detected orthogonal FSK. When RBNE is used with MSK and the observation interval is increased, the performance approaches that of antipodal signaling. The key feature of all these structures is multisymbol noncoherent processing with exploitation of the MSK inherent coding properties induced by its phase continuity. The use of binary block codes for MSK with N-MLBE is considered. It is shown that simple binary block codes with low bandwidth expansion that exploit the inherent MSK memory can give significant gains. >