An efficient joint convolutional code (CC)-coded DQPSK method

In digital communications, 90 or 180 degree phase ambiguity between the receiver and transmitter carrier is a serious problem for the coherent demodulation. To remove their phase ambiguity, differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) was proposed with the cost of a remarkable 2.4 dB performance degradation. Based on the iterative decoding (ID) scheme, an efficient joint convolutional code (CC)-coded DQPSK method is proposed to close the gap between quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and DQPSK. Using the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technique, we unveil that the low-complexity convolutional codes outperform the high-complexity Turbo codes for the ID scheme. Simulation results turn out that the proposed scheme can overcome the error-floor effect, and achieve almost 3.54 dB and 0.9 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain compared with the non-iterative CC at 10^-5 Bit Error Rate (BER)and iterative Turbo schemes at 10^-7 BER, respectively.