A Comparison of Modulation Techniques for Digital Radio

This paper describes and summarizes the characteristics of the modulation techniques most applicable to digital radio. The modulation techniques discussed are on-off-keying (OOK) with coherent and noncoherent detection, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), quadrature partial response (QPR), frequency-shift-keying (FSK) with noncoherent detection, continuous phase FSK (CP-FSK) with coherent and noncoherent detection, minimum-shift-keying (MSK), binary and quaternary phase-shift-keying (BPSK, QPSK) with coherent and differentially coherent detection, offset-keyed QPSK (OK-QPSK), -ary PSK with coherent detection ( ), and 16-ary amplitude and phase-shift-keying (APK). Functional descriptions of these schemes are provided and their performance is compared in a series of tables summarizing the results of the literature of the past 20 years. The modulation schemes are compared with respect to ideal (white Gaussian noise) performance, spectral properties, signaling speed, complexity, and the effects on performance of interference, fading and delay distortion.