Postdetection diversity receiver for DAPSK signals on the Rayleigh- and Rician-fading channel

In this paper, the optimum decision boundaries for (N, M) differential amplitude phase-shift keying on the Rayleigh-fading channel are analyzed. A postdetection maximal ratio combining (MRC) and weighted maximal ratio combining (WMRC) diversity receivers are proposed. In the Rayleigh-fading channel, assuming a high signal-to-noise ratio and a small normalized Doppler frequency, the analytical optimum decision boundaries are obtained. In addition, it is shown that an outer optimum decision boundary is the inverse of the inner optimum decision boundary. In the proposed MRC receiver, the decision at each branch is made based on the minimum distance criterion. The performance of the MRC receiver is analyzed, in terms of the union bound for bit error probability. The proposed WMRC receiver assigns weighting factors to the decision variable at each branch, based on the optimum decision boundaries. The performance of the WMRC is investigated through computer simulation and compared with those of MRC and equal gain combining (EGC). From the results, the performances of MRC and WMRC are found to be better than those of the EGC receiver on both the Rayleigh- and Rician-fading channels. It is also found that the performance improvement of WMRC over MRC is more pronounced as the number of diversity branches increases.