Tikhonov sum approach for joint carrier phase estimation and decoding in frequency-hopping communications

In this paper, we consider the problem of carrier phase estimation for an M-ary phase shift keying modulated frequency-hopping system affected by strong phase noise. An improved joint detection and decoding algorithm is presented based on the factor graph and sum-product algorithm framework. The messages on the factor graph are approximated into the sums of multiple Tikhonov distributions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields a very good performance in low signal-to-noise ratio while holding a relative low computational complexity compared with the existing ones.