Digital phase modulation using polynomial phase functions

A new digital phase modulation format is proposed which uses polynomial functions of time to phase modulate a sinusoidal carrier. Information bits from the source are mapped to the coefficients of the polynomial. The receiver decodes information by estimating the coefficients of the polynomial and mapping the estimates back to the corresponding bits. A transmitter and receiver structure for the polynomial phase modulation format is given. An example of the decoding algorithm is given for a quadratic polynomial phase signal. Compared to conventional phase shift keying (PSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats with the same rate (in bits/symbol), a significant gain in the error performance over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels is observed. The normalized effective bandwidth of is computed and compared for a quadratic and cubic polynomial phase modulated signal. The effective bandwidth shows the dependence of the spread of the power spectrum on the coefficients and the order of the polynomial.