Noncoherent detection of convolutionally encoded continuous phase modulation

The error probability at large signal-to-noise ratios of convolutionally encoded continuous phase frequency-shift keying with an optimum noncoherent detector on an additive white Gaussian noise channel is considered. The authors propose a limited tree search algorithm for noncoherent detection of coded and uncoded continuous-phase-modulation schemes. The error probability of this suboptimum noncoherent detector is evaluated by means of computer simulations on an additive white Gaussian noise channel. It is shown that the degradation in error performance compared to the performance of the coherent Viterbi detector is less than 1 dB with a relatively simple noncoherent detector for most of the considered schemes