An architecture of decision feedback differential phase detection of M-ary DPSK signals

An architecture of decision feedback differential phase detection (DF-DPD) of M-ary DPSK signals is proposed. Conventional differential detection of M-ary DPSK signals uses the phase difference between a current symbol and the previous symbol. This method can make the receiver architecture simple. But it has poorer BER performance than coherent detection because it uses the previous noisy signal as the phase reference. To improve the BER performance of conventional differential detection, multiple symbol differential detection methods, such as maximum likelihood differential detection (ML-DD), Viterbi-DD, decision feedback differential detection (DF-DD), and DF-DPD, using L-1 past detected symbols, have been proposed. As L increases, the BER performance of DF-DPD improves but the complexity of the architecture increases dramatically. Thus, this paper proposes the simplified DF-DPD architecture, replacing the conventional delay and addition architecture with one accumulator. The proposed architecture also has a good BER performance with minimizing the phase error of the current received symbol using the accumulated phase differences of all DPD. The simulation results show that the BER performance of the proposed architecture approaches that of coherent detection.