Effects of a Hard Limiting Repeater on the Performance of a DPSK Data Transmission System

Although the effects of a hard-limiting repeater on coherent phase shift keying (CPSK) data transmission systems have been studied, corresponding effects pertaining to differential phase shift keying (DPSK) systems are yet to be examined. The present paper contains the results of a study on DPSK data detection performance when a hard-limiting repeater is part of the overall data link under consideration, and white Gaussian noise is introduced at the repeater and receiver front ends; the extension to the multi-link system, containing cascaded hard-limiting repeaters, is also included. The results obtained were found to be analogous to those of previous CPSK studies. Specifically, the inclusion of the hard-limiter was generally shown to improve probability of error performance when downlink noise is present. A comparison of present results with those of previous ones for corresponding CPSK systems shows that DPSK is degraded noticeably more by downlink noise than its CPSK counterpart.