Efficient phase estimation for the classification of digitally phase modulated signals using the cross-WVD: a performance evaluation and comparison with the S-transform

This article presents a novel algorithm based on the cross-Wigner-Ville Distribution (XWVD) for optimum phase estimation within the class of phase shift keying signals. The proposed method is a special case of the general class of cross time-frequency distributions, which can represent the phase information for digitally phase modulated signals, unlike the quadratic time-frequency distributions. An adaptive window kernel is proposed where the window is adjusted using the localized lag autocorrelation function to remove most of the undesirable duplicated terms. The method is compared with the S-transform, a hybrid between the short-time Fourier transform and wavelet transform that has the property of preserving the phase of the signals as well as other key signal characteristics. The peak of the time-frequency representation is used as an estimator of the instantaneous information bearing phase. It is shown that the adaptive windowed XWVD (AW-XWVD) is an optimum phase estimator as it meets the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) at signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 5 dB for both binary phase shift keying and quadrature phase shift keying. The 8 phase shift keying signal requires a higher threshold of about 7 dB. In contrast, the S-transform never meets the CRLB for all range of SNR and its performance depends greatly on the signal's frequency. On the average, the difference in the phase estimate error between the S-transform estimate and the CRLB is approximately 20 dB. In terms of symbol error rate, the AW-XWVD outperforms the S-transform and it has a performance comparable to the conventional detector. Thus, the AW-XWVD is the preferred phase estimator as it clearly outperforms the S-transform.