Modulation and coding for mobile radio communications: channels with correlated Rice fading and Doppler frequency shift

We discuss the relative performance of coherent phase-shift keying (PSK), differential PSK (DPSK), and double differential PSK (DDPSK) modulation schemes over a mobile radio channel in which transmission is affected by additive noise, a constant carrier phase offset, a constant Doppler frequency shift, and correlated Rice fading. We first compare the performance of these schemes to assess the amount of degradation caused on each one of them by fading. Among our findings, we observe that DDPSK turns out to be less sensitive to the effects of correlated fading than the other two schemes and that in these conditions interleaving may not be beneficial. We then consider the introduction of trellis-coded modulation (TCM). The system we advocate as offering the best tradeoff between performance and complexity with the channel model assumed here includes double-differential encoding, differential detection, an open-loop Doppler phase tracking circuit, and differential decoding in addition to a simple TCM scheme.