Performance of sequence estimation scheme of narrowband digital FM signals with limiter-discriminator detection

A communication scheme using binary FM with noncoherent limiter-discriminator detection has been well known. Up to now, the improvement of bit error rate at the receiver side has been carried out through the bandwidth optimization of the IF filter, the decision feedback equalization (DFE), or simple two-state maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE). This channel is inherently the intersymbol interference (ISI) channel due to the premodulation baseband filtering as well as the narrowband IF filtering. So the sequence estimation scheme using the Viterbi algorithm can be applied successfully, although the channel is not additive white Gaussian and maximum likelihood in the strict sense. In this paper, through computer simulations, we examine the actual BER improvement of the sequence estimation scheme with multiple-state trellis especially for MSK and GMSK signals. We mainly consider static AWGN and frequency nonselective Rician fading channels. Consequently, by adjusting the IF filter bandwidth, very large estimation gains are obtained compared to the conventional DFE or MLSE detector for AWGN and Rician fading channels. This scheme does not produce large demodulation delay and is implemented only by adding the signal processing part to the final stage of the receiver. This scheme seems to be very useful for any applications including satellite mobile channels