Comments on "Differential detection with IIR filter for improving DPSK detection performance"

Hamamoto (see ibid., vol.44, no. 8, p.959-66, 1996) presented a detection technique for differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) with improved performance over conventional differential coherent detection. Leib (see ibid., vol.43, no.2/3/4, p.722-25, 1995) comments that this technique had been introduced much earlier. As correctly stated by Hamamoto the essence of the "new DPSK detection scheme" is based on a technique introduced by Leib and Pasupathy (1988). Differential coherent detection can be viewed as a scheme that uses the previous data symbol as a phase reference. The problem is that this phase reference suffers from the channel noise in very much the same way as the data symbol does and, therefore, it results in a performance degradation.