Noncoherent Detection of Tamed Frequency Modulation

Continuous-phase, constant-envelope digital modulation schemes are useful in various applications where a high spectrum utilization as well as immunity to nonlinear distortion is required. From this point of view, typical efficient schemes are digital partialresponse frequency modulation methods. The aim of this work is to investigate noncoherent detection in order to avoid the RF carrier recovery problem. In this paper we select for analysis tamed frequency modulation (TFM) as a particularly representative member of this class, but a similar analysis could be carried out for other partialresponse digital FM systems. After an evaluation of the optimal noncoherent detection and of differential phase detection of TFM, we propose a demodulation method based on a simple and efficient baseband processing of the output of a frequency demodulator. It turns out that the power loss with respect to coherent or optimal demodulation of TFM is on the order of 2 dB. The baseband processing here proposed is in some way equivalent to a partial recovery of the carrier phase and could be improved by using a more complex baseband processing such as a decoding scheme based on the Viterbi algorithm.