Data detection of MPSK in the presence of rapidly changing carrier phase

We present a novel method for data detection of M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) in the presence of unknown carrier phase and additive white Gaussian noise. Here, the unknown carrier phase is rapidly changing and random. That is, the unknown phase changes from symbol to symbol in a nondeterministic manner. The rate of phase change is such that phase change over two symbol intervals is negligible, but it is not necessarily negligible over a longer interval. Our proposed system outperforms traditional differential phase shift keying (DPSK) by 1.5 dB at error probabilities of 10/sup -3/ and 10/sup -4/. We also compare the performance of our scheme with that of multiple symbol differential detection (MSDD). Except under very slow phase change conditions, our scheme outperforms MSDD. Our decoder is well suited to mobile communication systems. Here, receivers usually move with different speeds at different times.