Iterative Multisymbol Noncoherent Reception of Coded CPFSK

A system involving the multisymbol noncoherent reception of coded continuous-phase frequency-shift keying is developed, optimized, and analyzed. Unlike coherent systems, the modulation index of the waveform does not need to be rational with a small denominator, and the oscillator only needs to be stable for the duration of a small block of symbols. The achievable performance over AWGN and Rayleigh block-fading channels is determined by computing the average mutual information, which is the capacity of a channel using the given modulation format and receiver architecture under the constraint of uniformly distributed input symbols. The code rate and modulation index are jointly optimized with respect to average mutual information under a bandwidth constraint. For binary and quaternary signaling, the information-theoretic results are corroborated by bit-error-rate curves generated using a standardized turbo code in conjunction with iterative demodulation and decoding. It is shown that, while more robust than a system with coherent reception, the proposed system offers superior energy efficiency compared with conventional single-symbol noncoherent reception.