This paper introduces the structure of a Q-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) signal and presents a noncoherent suboptimal receiver and a noncoherent optimal receiver. Aiming at addressing the lack of an accurate theoretical formula of the bit error rate (BER) of a Q-ary PPM receiver in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in the existing literature, the theoretical formulas of the BER of a noncoherent suboptimal receiver and noncoherent optimal receiver are derived, respectively. The simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical formulas. The theoretical formulas can be applied to a Q-ary PPM system including binary PPM. In addition, the analysis shows that the larger the Q, the better the error performance of the receiver and that the error performance of the optimal receiver is about 2 dB better than that of the suboptimal receiver. The relationship between the threshold coefficient of the suboptimal receiver and the error performance is also given.

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