Soft decision differential phase detection with Viterbi decoding in satellite mobile systems

Noncoherent sequence detection is considered with soft decision differential phase detection and Viterbi decoding. The proposed receiver is analyzed with convolutionally encoded binary FSK and DPSK signals over narrowband fading channels. Numerical results presented for a Gaussian, satellite mobile and land mobile channels indicate that the proposed soft decision sequence detection receiver performs significantly better than uncoded signals and hard decision sequence detection. The division of subregions in the soft decision differential phase detector is also analyzed.