Coded continuous phase modulation using ring convolutional codes

Rate 1/2 convolutional codes over the ring of integers modulo M are combined with M-ary continuous phase modulation (CPM) schemes whose modulation indices are of the form h=1/M. An M-ary CPM scheme with h=1/M can be modeled by a continuous-phase encoder (CPE) followed by a memoryless modulator (MM), where the CPE is linear over the ring of integers modulo M. The fact that the convolutional code and the CPE are over the same algebra allows the state of the CPE to be fed back and used by the convolutional encoder. A modified Euclidean distance function that substantially simplifies the search for good codes has been derived and used to find new codes. Numerical results show that this approach consistently improves the performance as compared to coded schemes using binary convolutional codes with the same decoding complexity.