Decomposition of M-ary CPM signals into PAM waveforms

It is widely known that minimum shift keying (MSK) may be seen as a PAM signaling scheme and that the same is true, albeit approximately, with MSK-like modulations. It is also known (perhaps not so widely) that any binary continuous phase-modulated (CPM) signal may be exactly decomposed into the sum of a few PAM waveforms. In this paper we show that this property extends to multilevel CPM signaling. Features of a PAM decomposition are discussed as a function of the alphabet size, the modulation index, and the frequency response of the system. It is found that, especially with signaling schemes with a long memory, the decomposition has so many terms that it becomes unmanageable. For these cases an approximation is proposed with a limited number of terms