A Low Complexity Multi-symbol Non-coherent MSK Receiver

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data link as the premise of UAV's c cooperative engagement capability will greatly affect the combat effectiveness of UAV. Good frequency utilization and power utilization means that MSK is suitable for UAV data link. The complexity of the traditional MSK coherent receiver is too high to apply to the UAV platform, and the traditional non-coherent receiver has poor BER performance. This paper introduces an improved structure based on MSK multi-symbol non-coherent detection algorithm, which is simplified multi-symbol non-coherent detection (SMND) receiver. The performance simulations show that the theoretical limit performance of the receiver is comparable to that of a coherent receiver and the receiver is significantly better than a conventional non-coherent receiver. In AWGN channel where the bit error rate (BER) is 10–5, the performance of the SMND receiver in this paper is superior to one-bit differential by 2.5 dB, superior to the non-coherent envelope detection by 3.2 dB, and achieves only loss of 0.3 dB comparing to the theoretical limit of coherent demodulation. Furthermore, the SMND algorithm has good performance of anti-frequency offset and anti-bit timing error.