Performance of interleaved trellis-coded differential 8-PSK modulation over fading channels

The performance of trellis-coded differential octal phase-shift keying (coded 8-DPSK) with differentially coherent detection and soft-decision Viterbi decoding is investigated. A suitable receiver is presented whose signal processing is based on Nyquist signaling, requiring only one complex sample per modulation interval. Symbol synchronization and automatic frequency control are performed in a decision-directed way. Bit-error-rate (BER) performance over Gaussian, Rayleigh, and Rician channels is determined by means of computer simulations. The performance of coded 8-DPSK on the Gaussian channel is shown for a four-state convolutional trellis code. The unquantized outputs of up to three symbol detectors with delays of 1, 2, and 3 symbol periods are used for metric computation. The coding gain which includes losses due to timing and frequency synchronization errors is found to be 2.5 dB at BER=10^-5 with respect to uncoded 4-DPSK. Much larger gains are achieved for fading channels if interleaving is applied. Using an eight-state trellis code the performance is determined on Rayleigh and Rician channels for various Doppler spreads and interleaver sizes