Abstract-We consider soft-output detection of a binary continuous phase modulation (CPM) generated through a low-cost transmitter, thus characterized by a significant modulation index uncertainty, and sent over a channel affected by phase noise. The proposed detector is designed by adopting a simplified representation of a binary CPM signal with the principal component of its Laurent decomposition and is obtained by using the framework based on factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm. It does not require an explicit estimation of the modulation index nor of the channel phase and is very robust to large uncertainties of the nominal value of the modulation index. Being soft-output in nature, this detector can be employed for iterative detection/decoding of practical coded schemes based on a serial concatenation, possibly through a pseudo-random interleaver, of an outer encoder and a CPM modulation format.

Abstract-We consider binary continuous phase modulation (CPM) signals used in some recent low-cost and low-power consumption telecommunications standard. When these signals are generated through a low-cost transmitter, the real modulation index can end up being quite different from the nominal value employed at the receiver and a significant performance degradation is observed, unless proper techniques for the estimation and compensation are employed. For this reason, we design new binary schemes with a much higher robustness. They are based on the concatenation of a suitable precoder with binary input and a ternary CPM format. The result is a family of CPM formats whose phase state is constrained to follow a specific evolution. Two of these precoders are considered. We will discuss many aspects related to these schemes, such as the power spectral density, the spectral efficiency, simplified detection, the minimum distance, and the uncoded performance. The adopted precoders do not change the recursive nature of CPM schemes. So these schemes are still suited for serial concatenation, through a pseudo-random interleaver, with an outer channel encoder.

We design new continuous phase modulation (CPM) formats which are based on the combination of a proper precoder with binary input and a ternary CPM. The proposed precoder constrains the signal phase evolution in order to increase the minimum Euclidean distance, and to limit the bandwidth expansion due to the use of a ternary CPM. The resulting schemes are highly spectrally efficient and outperform classical binary and quaternary formats in terms of coded and uncoded performance.

This paper deals with a reduced-complexity per survivor processing-based CPM demodulation. It relies on a trellis with reduced state number and defined from a rational modulation index possibly different from the transmit modulation index and referred to as virtual receiver modulation index. The virtual receiver modulation index should be chosen so as to achieve a tradeoff between error-rate performance and complexity reduction. The main purpose of this paper is the choice of the virtual receiver modulation index. It gives guidelines to discard the values of the virtual receiver modulation index, that degrade the error-rate performance. Two criteria are used. The first one considers the uncoded CPM case and is based on an approximation of the minimal Euclidean distance. The second one is related to the bit interleaved coded CPM case and resorts to an EXIT chart to analyse the convergence of the iterative receiver. Index terms: continuous phase modulation, EXIT charts, minimum Euclidean distance, per survivor processing, iterative decoding.