Improved differential detection of chip-level differentially encoded direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals

In a paper by Cavallini et al. (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 45, p.456-63, Apr. 1997), chip-level differential encoding/detection for direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals was proposed to cope with frequency-nonselective fast fading channels. It was shown that, unlike in the additive white Gaussian noise channel, in time-varying fading channels the system performance may be considerably improved, especially when the spreading factor is increased. In this paper, noncoherent sequence detection, recently proposed by the authors, is the starting point for the derivation of receivers with improved performance with respect to that of standard differential detection. For M-ary phase-shift keying signals, a theoretical analysis is performed and the results are confirmed by means of computer simulation. The performance advantage of taking into account a larger phase memory, with respect to the minimum accounted for by differential detection, is demonstrated. In particular, the amount of phase memory is optimized as a function of the Doppler spread for a Rayleigh frequency-nonselective fading channel. The robustness in the presence of phase noise is also investigated by means of computer simulation.