Error Rate Bounds for Digital PAM Transmission with Phase Jitter and Intersymbol or Cochannel Interference

A simple method is presented for computing upper and lower bounds for binary PAM signaling over channels with phase jitter. Other impairments to reliable communication are taken to be additive thermal noise and intersymbol or cochannel interference. The important cases of binary and quadrature phase shift keying are cases for which the analysis presented is valid. The method consists of finding upper and lower bounds conditioned on the phase jitter, φ, in a form in which the auguments of theQ-functions involved are linear incos phiandsin phi. When these functions are represented by a piecewise linear approximation, the average of these bounds can be given in closed form. In most cases 5 piecewise linear segments provides an error rate estimate that is accurate to at least 1 dB in system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).