The Effects of Time Delay Spread on Portable Radio Communications Channels with Digital Modulation

Frequency-selective fading caused by multipath time delay spread degrades digital communication channels by causing inter-symbol interference, thus resulting in an irreducible BER and imposing a upper limit on the data symbol rate. In this paper, a frequency-selective, slowly fading channel is studied by computer simulation. The unfiltered BPSK, QPSK, OQPSK, and MSK modulations are considered first to illustrate the physical insights and the error mechanisms. Two classes of modulation with spectral-shaping filtering are studied next to assess the tradeoff between spectral occupancy and the performance under the influence of time delay spread. The simulation is very flexible so that different channel parameters can be studied and optimized either individually or collectively. The irreducible BER averaged over fading samples with a given delay profile is used to compare different modulation/detection methods, while the cumulative distribution of short-term BER is employed to show allowable data symbol rates for given values of delay spread. It is found that both GMSK and QPSK with a raised-cosine Nyquist pulse are suitable for a TDM/TDMA digital portable communications channel.