Nonredundant error correction DQPSK for the aeronautical-satellite channel

The performance of differentially encoded quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) system employing nonredundant error correction (NEC) receivers with single- and double-error correction capability is analyzed and evaluated for the aeronautical satellite channel. The NEC is an attractive coding technique which employs differential detectors with more than one symbol delay elements and which does not introduce any redundancy as other coding schemes do. As typical for aeronautical satellite communications, a Rician fading channel with Gaussian power spectrum has been considered. Unlike the additive, uncorrelated from symbol to symbol interference such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) or static cochannel interference (CCI) which has been investigated in the past, analysis of the performance in a fading channel is much more difficult. The difficulty arises from the multiplicative and correlative nature of the fading interference. Bit error rate (BER) performance evaluation results have been obtained by means of computer simulation for various channel conditions, including different values of the K-factor and the fading B _DT. These results have indicated that considerable performance gains as compared with conventional differentially detected systems are achieved for high values of K and for very fast fading. Both of these conditions are encountered in typical aeronautical communication systems. Wherever possible, heuristic explanations of the trend of the obtained BER performance evaluation results are also given.<>