The Effect of Bandlimiting Filters on Probability of Error of MSK

Minimum Shift Keying (MSK) is a method of modulation which can be viewed as a special case of Frequency Shift Keying or a special form of Offset Quadrature Phase Shift Keying; therefore, it can be detected either by a discriminator or with a pair of matched filters. In the latter case, the system is optimal, provided there are no bandlimiting filters in the transmitter and receiver. These filters introduce intersymbol interference and hence degrade the performance of the system. In this paper we investigate analytically the effect of a bandlimiting filter in the receiver on the error probability of the system, presenting numerical results when that filter is of the Butterworth type. It is shown that a very simple suboptimal detector outperforms the matched filter detector so long as
2W/R_{b} < 1.3
, where R
b
is the bit rate and
W
is the single sided 3 dB bandwidth of the bandlimiting filter.