Reduced state Viterbi differential phase detection of MDPSK signals

An improved differential phase detection scheme that uses a reduced state Viterbi algorithm (RSVDPD) is proposed for the reception of M-ary differential phase shift keying (MDPSK) signals. The transmitted sequence is estimated from the received signal phases only. The number of trellis states equals that of the signal constellation points M. The branch metric is computed by tracing back the surviving path connected to each state. The bit error rate (BER) performance with RSVDPD is evaluated using computer simulation for 4DPSK transmission in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels