A noncoherent coded modulation for 16QAM

In this paper, we present a noncoherent coded 16QAM (NC-16QAM) scheme by modifying the trellis-coded 16QAM (TC-16QAM) scheme. The simulation results show that the performance of the NC-16QAM with noncoherent detection is close to the one of the original TC-16QAM with coherent detection. The NC-16QAM in this paper is an extension of the NC-8PSK recently obtained by Wei and Lin (see IEEE Communications Letters, vol.2, no.9, p.260-2, Sept. 1998). A noncoherent initial phase estimation algorithm is also proposed.