Evaluation of cellular mobile telephone data receivers

Some measurement techniques and results employed to evaluate advanced mobile phone system (AMPS) data receivers being driven by a Rayleigh fading channel are described. These performance measurements were used as a mechanism for comparing the design effectiveness of various bit clock recovery systems. Of five data receiver types evaluated, two models employed a full-wave rectifier in the bit clock recovery system. In this system nominal diode unbalance may cause the derived bit clock to lock 180° from the phase required to properly decode the incoming bit stream. This condition may even occur at high carrier-to-noise ratios when message structures containing long strings of ones or zeros are received. The other data receiver types employed digital signal processing for clock recovery to circumvent this phase ambiguity problem. The performance data of five data receivers are compared to noncoherent frequency-shift keying (FSK) as a model. In most cases, the test results are in good agreement with this model. The performance measurements presented include derived clock jitter and single and average bit error rates as a function of average carrier-to-noise ratios. The implementation of test instrumentation and the interpretation of test results are discussed. The objective is to stress the capability of simulation measurements to evaluate mobile receiver designs in a laboratory environment.