Modulation and Detection for Simple Receivers in Rapidly Time-Varying Channels

We investigate the performance degradation of basic modulation schemes in a rapidly time-varying channel using a first-order autoregressive channel model. Various performance metrics are used to indicate the relative advantages of each modulation scheme. We find that noncoherent frequency-shift keying (FSK) is suitable for operating at very high mobility and high signal-to-noise ratio, ideal for some military applications. We then propose a partially coherent detector for FSK and differential phase-shift keying that exploits partial channel knowledge to enable the receiver to operate effectively in both fast and slow fading. The maximum-likelihood rule obtained for the partially coherent FSK turns out to be a linear combination of coherent and noncoherent detection rules. Results demonstrate that significant performance improvement can be achieved over the best of coherent and noncoherent FSK detection. The detector is robust to estimation errors present in the channel statistics. We also propose a few adaptive schemes that employ various combinations of modulation schemes to increase the robustness of the system in fast fading