Robust Iterative Noncoherent Reception of Coded FSK over Block Fading Channels

An iterative noncoherent receiver is developed for bit-interleaved coded orthogonal multiple frequency-shift keying (FSK) over block fading channels. The receiver uses the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to jointly estimate the received amplitude and noise spectral density of each block. The received symbols and their corresponding channel estimates are passed through a soft-output demapper, deinterleaved, and decoded. Soft-outputs from the decoder are passed back to the channel estimator and demapper to refine estimates of the channel and bit likelihoods, respectively. Several techniques for reducing the estimator's complexity are discussed, and the performance is assessed through simulation.