Noncoherent maximum-likelihood block detection of orthogonal NFSK-LDPSK signals

This paper investigates the noncoherent block detection of orthogonal N frequency-shift keying (FSK)-L differential phase shift keying (DPSK) signals transmitted over the additive white Gaussian noise channel, based on the principle of maximum-likelihood (ML) sequence estimation. By virtue of a union bound argument, asymptotic upper bounds for the bit error probability of the developed ML block receiver are derived and verified by simulation. It is analytically shown that the noncoherent NFSK-LDPSK ML block receiver performs comparably with the ideal coherent NFSK-L phase shift keying (PSK) receiver for L = 2 and 4, as the observation block length is large enough. Furthermore, substantial performance improvement can be achieved by the ML block detection of the NFSK-LDPSK signal with L > 2 by increasing the observation block length.