Performance of quadrature pulse-overlapping modulated signals in Rayleigh fading channels

The authors discuss the average bit error probability of constant envelope quadrature pulse-overlapping modulation and maximum likelihood Viterbi decoding in a Rayleigh fading channel. The quadrature pulse-overlapping modulation is first decomposed into a linear encoder followed by a memoryless modulator. An upper bound on the average bit error probability as a function of the transfer function of the linear encoder is then developed under the assumption of using the Viterbi decoder with perfect fading amplitude measurement. Tightness of the bound was examined by means of computer simulation. A performance comparison with conventional quadrature phase shift keying is also provided