Application of the viterbi algorithm to the detection of compact spectrum

A Viterbi detector is described-for detection of the ternary compact spectrum output waveform presented by Veillard [1]. The performance of the detector with additive noise is compared by simulation, to threshold detection of the same waveform. It is demonstrated that the implementation of the Viterbi algorithm for this case is relatively simple. The Viterbi detector presented is shown to produce a lower bit error rate than theshold detection for a given amount of additive noise. It is also shown that 4-bit quantization before Viterbi detection is sufficient to produce results essentially the same as those obtained without quantization.