DOQPSK - Differential Demodulation of Filtered Offset QPSK

Christoph G. Gkther* and Joachim Habermam**

* ASCOM Tech L t d . ,Gewerbepark, 5506 Migenwil, Switzerland

** Facbhochschule Giessen-Friedberg, 61 169 Friedberg, Germany

Ahtmcf: Offset QPSK (OQPSK) and xl4-QPSK have been studied intensively over the last years for application in digital mobile radio systems. Though OQPSK shows a better performance over nonlinear channels than x/QQPSK, the latter is preferred, since it allows for differential demodulation, which is an attractive combined channel estimation and demodulation technique on fast fading channels. In the present paper, we describe a receiver for the differential demodulation of differentially modulated OQPSK signals. The bit error rate of the new receiver is compared with x/QDQPSK on AWGN and Rayleigh fading linear ckurnclr, with transmitter and receiver raised m i n e pulse shaping being assumed in all cases. On these linear channels and a roll o f factor r = 0.5, a loss of less than 0.5 dB of DoQPsK with respect t o n/QDQPSK i s found. Therefore, the advantage o f OQPSK over x/QQPSK on non-linear channels w i l l essentially be maintained with differential demodulation. I. INTRODUCTION
For several years, an ongoing discussion about the modulation format for emerging digital cellular mobile radio systems has taken place (see for instance 111 and [2]). The secpnd generation American Digital Cellular n/4-QPSK. The Standard (ADC-U.S. TIA 45.3) spe~ifies same modulation format is also used by the Japanese Digital Cellular (JDC) System and for the Trans European Trunked Radio (TETRA). The choice of x/4-QPSK is motivated by two observations: Firstly, the envelope of nI4-QPSK has no zeros. This reduces the generation of harmonics and the distortion of the signal by amplifier non-linearities. The former property is important for the overall system performance and the latter one for the link performance. Secondly, a differential precoding of nI4-QPSK signals allows for simple differential demodulators, which is a highly desirable property when the carrier phase of the received signal changes rapidly, as it is the case on fading mobile radio channels. Since OQPSK shows further r e d u d envelope fluctuations (see Fig.1, from [3]), it outperfoms x/4-QPSK on non-linear channels. The non-availability of a differential demodulator for OQPSK, however, led to a clear preference for nl4-QPSK.

The difficulty of differential demodulation is due to the time overlap of the I- and Qsigoals. Our objective is to show a differential demodulator which can cope with this.

Fig. 1: Complex phase plots of x/4QPSK and OQPSK for r-0.4

The paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the system model. Section Iu gives a derivation of the differential demodulator for raised cosine filtered DOQPSK. Section IV,finally, describes simulation r d t s f DOQPSK on liuear channels. which show d losses o 11. MODEM COIWIGURATION
A. Transmitter

The model of the DOQPSK tranSmiaer i s shown i n Fig.2. It diffem from standard OQPsK by including a differential encoder.

Differential Encoder

xlk
,Pulse Shaping

LPF

serial

data input

Fig. 2 DoQPSK TraasmitterModel

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@ 1994 IEEE

The detailed description is as follows: the serial stream of bits (ao, Po, a l rpl, ...) of rate l/Tb is split into an Iand Q-stream txk and p k , respectively. The bits are encoded differentially and the Q-stre!am is shifted by Td2. We thus have:

1 1 1 . DOQPSK DEMODULATOR A . General Remarks

These baseband signals are filtered by square root

raised cosine filters (including x/sin(x) aperture equalizers)

and are input to quadrature a modulator.

B. Receiver
Fig. 3 shows the block diagram of the receiver. cos(wt)

Let us shortly reconsider the difficulties with differential demodulation of OQPSK. In OQPSK, the I- and Qchannels are staggered, i.e., time shifted by half a symbol period. With coherent demodulation, the I- and Q-components are recovered and the time shift is of no relevance. In a differential scheme, however, t h i s time shift leads to a mutual interferenceof the I- and Q-components. Conventional differential demodulators, like those described in 141, can no more be applied. The interference needs to be resolved. The situation is similar to the differential demodulation of MSK, which can be seen as a modified form of OQPSK (see 151). Essentially, with MSK, sinusoidal pulses are being used instead of rectangular ones with OQPSK. For MSK it is known that the error performance with differential demedulation and symbol by symbol decision is poor (see [6]).

B. Demodulator Structure for Nyquist Pulse Shaping

-sin( 0 t)
Fig. 3: D o Q P S K Receiver Model

The received signal r(t) is down-converted and low pars fdtered with square root raised w i n e filters. The I- and Q-components of the resulting complex baseband signal are sampled at the rate 2(Ts. In the case of a roll off factor 1, the received signal b e c o m e s

The structure of the demodulator is the same for any type of Nyquist filtering. Let us consider the I-channel, for example. Due to the Nyquist criterim, there is no interference from other Ichannel symbols. However, there may be an infinite number of Q-channel symbols which interfere with the I-channel symbol considered. Amongst the possible Nyquist pulse shapes, we shall restrict ourselves to raised cosine filtered signals with a roll off r=l. In this case, only the previous and next Q-channel symbol interfere on a given I-channel symbol (see (2)). This is shown in Fig. 4.

-1

where zl, and nl denote the transmitted complex baseband signal, the slowly varying phase, and the noise, respectively. The latter is typically assumed to be white Gaussian. In the case of interference, square root raised Cosine filtered white Gaussian noise has also to be considered.
TIE differential phase preprocessing rlq2* then eliminaa n d provides the input for the tes the unknown phase

Fig. 4: I- and Qchannel signals which satisfy Nyquist 1 and 2

metric c o m p u t a t i o n of the trellis d e algorithm. This part is discussed in the following section.

The interference from Q- to I-channel needs to be resolved using a trellis. Let us first consider the output of the preprocessing at the sampling values 1=2k, when no noise is considered:

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and then at the sampling values 1=2k+I:

Similarly, we need to consider transitions from the lto the final state y2kinitial state 1X2ky2k+lX2k+2at tbe odd Samphg pOhb. NOW, it is htereshg to Ime that & + l = q k and Y=+i"Yzk When the initial and final states are coosidered at odd and even sampling points. This means that the resulting 16 state trellis with two transitions leaving and entering each node is essentially time invariant. In Table 1, we show the transitions and their associated values of X and Y. Since both X and Y are invariant when we complement the i n i t i a l and f m l state, only the fmt 8 transitions are included. Note that the output of the differential preprocessing unit X and Y can take 4 and 5 values, respectively, instead of the familiar 3 values of DQPSK. 'Ihese values can be

If we could somehow obtain estimates of x and y, differential decoding also provides estimates of a and 9:

observed at the sampling points of t h e eye diagram shown in Fig. 5. (In Fig. 5 R(t) is identical with X(t).)

TABLE 1 TRELLIS FOR DoQPSK WITH NYQUIST 1 AND 2 PULSE SHAPING

2.

R(t)
1.

1111 1111 1 1 1-1 1 1 1-1 1 1-1 1 1 1-1 1 1 1-1-1 1 1-1-1 1-1 1 1

1111 1 1 1-1 1 1-1 1 1 1-1-1 1-1 1 1 1-1 1-1 1-1-1 1 1-1-1-1 -1111

-rrrT
prpTpr 1 - T

r2-3-

0.

-1.

p-p(-1p-

Fig. 5: Eye diagrams of the signals R(t)-X(t) and Y(t) for 1 1 -

r p -

-1-1-1 1 -1-1-1-1

F i r T T 1544

h order to complete the description of the d e m o d u l a t o r , we need to indicate the metric that shall be used. Under the usual assumption of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), this metric is the squared Euclidean distance, i.e., the metric increment is the squared Euclidean distance between the samples (X,Y) and the values from Table 1. Obviously, this is an approximation even in the case of AWGN channel noise, since the square root raised cosme filtering at the receiver destroys the whiteness and since

the non-linear preprocessing also destroys the property of being Gaussian. The departure from Gaussian noise can be neglected at high signal to noise ratios. The detailed impact of the approximation is assessed through the simulations in the next session.

IV.SIMULATION RESULTS
The computer simulation was based on a discrete time complex baseband signal representation, except for the filter sections where frequency domain representations were used. The block diagrams of Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 show the high level description of the simulation Root raised cosine f i l m with a roll off factor r are used for pulse shaping. The trellis decoder is as specified by the state diagram of Table 1. The metric is the squared Euclidean dismce. Remember that this setting has been derived to be used f f factor r= 1. Another value of r would have with a roll o led to a different trellis. The interference of an infinite number of Q-channel samples on a given I-channel would have required a reduced state decoding sheme. The eye diagrams for X(t)==R(t) and Y(t) in the case of r=0.5, shown in Fig. 6, suggest that the r=l trellis may lead to a r e d d state decoding with an acceptable performance. This is what we have investigated in more detail.

Fig. 7 shows results for DOQPSK on an AWGN channel for different roll off factors. In the same figure, results for unfiltered DQPSK (plaine line) are also included. They can be considered as representative for Unfiltered n/CDQPSK, if the differential encoding is over two symbols, i.e., if the I-component xI satisfies the relation X2kxZk-2=ak, where ak is the k-th I-channel bit and if the Q-component satisfies a similar relation. The unfiitered n/CDQPSK results are also representative for the filtered case as long as the the filtering satisfies the Nyquist criterion. The curve for DOQPSK and r=l, plotted as a dotted line, shows a certain degradation at small values of This is due to the use of an approximation for the metric in the detection algorithm (see above). However, for higher E p o , the curve for DOQPSK converges to that of DQPSK (n/CDQPSK). Furthermore, the degradation of the performance in the case of r-0.5 (dashed line) remains surprisingly low, namely around 0.5dB in the range of interest.

Fig. 7: BER versus E &

on an AWGN channel

i . 0.00

'Yk . 0.125

At r=0.3 (dash-dotted line), the increased intersymbol interference leads to an irreducible error rate that starts to become perceptible. The actual irreducible error rate could not be determined due to the excessive duration of the simulation At r=0.3, the degradation is still acceptable for the " m i s s i o n of digitized speech. In the case of computer data, however, thinking about a more adapted reduced state trellis starts to become worthwile. In a narrowband mobile radio communications system, transmission channels subject to Rayleigh fading with a Jakes Doppler spectrum are commonly considered. We, cmespondingly, ran simulations for such channels. The product of Doppler shift fd and symbol duration T, was chosen to be 0.007.

Fig. 6 Eye diagrams of the signals R(t)-X(t) and Y(t) for r0.5

At 900 MHz and a data rate of 36 kbivs, this corresponds to a vehicle speed of 1501rm/h. Fig. 8 shows the

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results for fdtered DOQPSK with r=0.5, and r-0.3 as well as the results for n/4-DQPSK described in [ 7 ] .As expected,DOQPSK again shows small losses when compared to nl4-DQPSK.

Systems," IEEE Trans. Veh Technd., vol. 40, pp. 355-365, May

lo-1,

BER --.
r0.3

1991. [3] European Te1eco"unicatioas St.ndards IastitutiOa ETSI, "Bit Ermr Performance of n/4-QPSK and OQPSK," ElS&TC-RES 6.2(9Z-Z45),1991. [4] J.G. Proakis,"Digital C i n n m u n i c a t i a n s , " McGmw- Hill, 1989. [S] S . Gmemeyer, A. McBride, ' 'MSK cud offsa QPSK Modulgtion," IEEE Tram. on Commun, pjk 809-819, August 1976. [6] J. Andetson, T. Aulm, C . E . Snndberg, ' 'Digital phae Modulrtion," Plenum Press. 1986. 171 European TelecommunicationsStpndprds Institatioa ETSI, ' *Sitnulat i ~ n Results fOr x14-DQPSK and OQPSK," nS@TC-RES 6 2 (91-141), 1991.

1 o-2

- 4 4 - DQPSK
10-3
I I

E& /No [dBl

10 12

14

16

18

20

22

Fig. 8: BER vetsus E & , Rayleigb fading channel w i t h f, .T, 0.007 (f,: maximum Doppler frequency)

V. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

A receiver s t ~ a for m the differential &modulation of filtered DOQPSK signals was derived. Its essential elements are a differential r p and a trellis decoder. In the specific case of raised cosine pulse shaping with a roll o f f factor t-1, the trellis has 16 states. On the linear channels considered, the performane degradation with respect to DQPSK was found to be i t s i g n i f i c a n t .When the Same simple t-l-demodulator was used for signals filtered with a roll o f f factor d . 5 ( J X system for instawe), a degradation of around 0.5 di3 in the range of interest was found. This holds for both AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. The new receiver structure disproves the frequent belief that OQPSK and different demodulation cannot be combih e reduced complexity of the ned. The trade off between t power amplifier and the maeased complexity of the baseband processing must clearly be made on a case by case basis. It is, however, certainly worthwile to use this additional degree of freedom in the design of future mobile radio ~ u n i c a t i o n system.

VI. REFERENCES
[l] H. Fuukawa, K. Matsuyama, T. Sato, T. Takaaka. and Y. Takeda, ' 'A xi4 Shifted DQPSK Demodulatorfor Pemd Mobile Communications System." PIMRC'92. pp. 618622. Bostoa,MA, Oct. 1992. [Z] K. Feher, 'MODEMS for Emerging Digital Cellular-Mobile Radio

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