On noncoherent sequence detection of coded QAM

New noncoherent sequence detection algorithms for combined demodulation and decoding of coded linear modulations transmitted over additive white Gaussian noise channels are presented. These schemes may be based on the Viterbi algorithm and have a performance which approaches that of coherent detection for increasing complexity. The tradeoff between complexity and performance is simply controlled by a parameter referred to as implicit phase memory and the number of trellis states.