Quadrature Overlapped Raised-Cosine Modulation

A variation of an old but neglected pulse shaping technique, raised-cosine, is investigated. By overlapping raised-cosine pulses in each of two data streams and then by quadrature combining them, a simple QPSK/MSK type modulation results. This quadrature overlapped raised-cosine (QORC) modulation exhibits a hybrid structure of QPSK and MSK modulations. The power spectral density of QORC is shown to take on the form of the product of the power spectral densities of MSK and QPSK. The obvious consequences are that the power spectral density main lobe retains the width of the spectral density main lobe of QPSK, but the sidelobes drop off much faster . A simple QORC modulator can be implemented similar to an MSK modulator. Several correlation type receivers are investigated and their performances calculated. Computer simulation results are used to compare end-to-end system performance of QORC and staggered QORC (SQORC) with MSK, QPSK, and staggered QPSK (SQPSK) for both linear and nonlinear satellite channels. The performance of QORC and SQORC compares very favorably with QPSK, SQPSK, and MSK. QORC performs particularly well in the presence of a nonlinear channel. The effect of phase equalization of the channel filter was investigated with outstanding performance improvement. The simulation results show that sidelobe regeneration caused by the channel nonlinearity is much less for SQORC than it is for the other modulation formats considered.