Viterbi detection with simultaneous suboptimal maximum likelihood carrier phase estimation

The authors consider maximum-likelihood (ML) detection of convolutionally coded data over the AWGN channel with unknown carrier phase. A receiver is developed for simultaneous ML data decoding and suboptimal ML carrier-phase estimation. The receiver is readily implementable and, for a circular signal constellation, it is totally linear. Computer simulations using two different models of the time-varying carrier phase indicate that the receiver provides good bit error probability performance