Imperfect Carrier Recovery Effect on Filtered PSK Signals

Coherent demodulation of a PSK signal requires the generation of a local carrier phase reference. Methods are given to determine the detection loss caused by noisy phase recovery and its use in the coherent detection of filtered BPSK and QPSK signals. It is assumed that the phase noise can have a static part and a random component with a Tikhonov-type distribution. The static part is mostly due to offset frequency tracking of the PLL used to recover the carrier, while the random component is due to thermal noise present in the carrier recovery loop and is also due to the random nature of the phase modulation. It is shown that the probability of error of BPSK and QPSK can be expressed as a finite sum of a set of strictly alternating converging series when the number of ISI terms is finite. Upper and lower bounds on the probability of error have been derived when this number becomes infinite and we show how this error rate can be computed with any desired accuracy. Numerical results are presented for various values of static error and phase noise variance when the transmit and receive filters are 4-pole Butterworth filters. For filtered PSK signals and for a bit error rate of 10-6, our results show that the additional degradation in presentday receiver systems due to imperfect carrier recovery can be less than 0.1 dB for BPSK and less than 1 dB for QPSK.