Frequency domain processing techniques for continuous phase modulation

The continuous phase modulation (CPM) has a constant envelope and compact output power spectrum that makes it a promising underlying technology for power and spectrum efficient broadband wireless communications. However, high implementation complexity (especially the complexity of the receiver) required to deal with the phase memory and inter-symbol interference has impeded its adoption for broadband wireless communications, and only a few simple CPM modulation schemes have mainly been used, e.g. binary MSK and GMSK. Thus, research on efficient CPM transceivers to reduce the computational and hardware complexity is important. The major contribution of this dissertation is the development of novel frequency domain processing techniques and transceiver strategies to improve power and spectral efficiency, and reduce the complexity of CPM modulation schemes. First, this dissertation presents simplified frequency domain receiver structures and decoding schemes in the frequency domain for binary and M-ary CPM block transmission. The frequency domain receivers utilize parallel and serial structures with frequency domain processing which considerably reduces hardware and computational complexity compared to conventional time-domain processing. In addition, the decoding schemes in the frequency domain eliminate the controlled phase memory through frequency domain phase equalization instead of maximum-likelihood sequential decoders, e.g. Viterbi decoders. Second, frequency domain channel estimation schemes for CPM block transmission are presented, which adopt superimposed training signals to achieve bandwidth and power efficiency while reducing the complexity. In these schemes, the proposed frequency domain channel estimation uses the superimposed training signals as a reference signal to reduce the throughput loss caused by conventionally multiplexed training signals. Superimposed training signal design is presented, and the trade-off between bandwidth efficiency and power efficiency is also analyzed. Third, block transmission schemes and frequency domain equalization methods for CPM are proposed, which consider linear processing instead of conventional decomposition-based processing. The schemes of frequency domain linear processing avoid the complexity overhead (both in computation and hardware) of conventional orthogonal- or Laurent decomposed-based equalizers. Finally, this dissertation extends CPM block transmission and frequency domain equalization to phase-coded (time-varying modulation index) CPM, which shows better error performance and bandwidth efficiency than fixed modulation index CPM's.