A differentially coherent receiver for minimum shift keying signal

The author extends to the case of minimum-shift-keying (MSK) modulation the differentially coherent reception theory established for phase-shift-keying modulation. A novel differentially coherent detector for MSK is thus derived. The receiver filter is equivalent to the cascade of a matched filter and an equalizer in order to suppress inherent intersymbol interference. It is shown that performance can be improved when the delay between signals, multiplied by the differential detector, is increased from one to M bit time intervals. This decreases the effect of noise correlation and, thus, the bit error probability. The bit error probability of the proposed receiver is calculated. It is found that almost all potential improvement due to the delay M is obtained with M=3