Non-coherent detection of MFSK signals in the presence of oscillator phase noise in an AWGN channel

Hussain and Barton (see Seventh IEE European Conference on Mobile Personal Communications, p.95-98, 1993) have shown that noncoherent binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) is subject to an irreducible error rate in the presence of phase noise. This paper extends the analysis of the performance degradation caused by oscillator phase noise to non-coherent orthogonal M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK). It is shown that for a given bit rate, a particular level of MFSK may prove more robust than others before being subject to an irreducible enter rate. Results are presented in the form of bit error rate (BER) versus Eb/No plots for M=2, 4, 8 and 16. The performance degradation for higher M can also be determined by this analysis