Continuous Phase Chirp (CPC) Signals for Binary Data Communication - Part II: Noncoherent Detection

Previous work has shown that coherent multiple bit observation of binary continuous phase chirp (CPC) signals gives improved error rate performance compared to the conventional bit-by-bit detection scheme. This paper determines bounds on the error rate improvement made possible by multiple bit observation for optimum and suboptimum [average matched filter (AMF)] noncoherent detection of binary CPC signals in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). For the same observation interval, it is shown that noncoherent CPC receivers provide higher signal-to-noise (SNR) gain than coherent receivers compared to the respective optimum single bit schemes. In particular, the three-bit noncoherent AMF receiver is shown to yield 3 dB SNR gain over a wide range of signal parameters.