BER evaluation of symbol-aided coherent demodulation for Rician and Rayleigh fading channels

We examine the applicability of symbol-aided demodulation (SAD) to Rayleigh and Rician fading channels, which are the channels most frequently encountered in terrestrial mobile communications and satellite communications, respectively. The effects of filtering and interpolation on the bit error rate (BER) performance of the SAD system are evaluated. The BER comparisons for optimum Wiener filtering and linear interpolation are carried out. The BER of SAD systems in the presence of Rician fading are compared with those of the fully coherent and differentially coherent schemes. It is established that SAD performance is close to that of perfectly coherent demodulation and significantly better than differentially coherent demodulation for a wide range of system and channel parameters.