Viterbi decoding of differentially encoded PSK signals transmitted over Rayleigh frequency-flat fading channels

Maximum Likelihood (bit) detection of differentially encoded M-PSK signals on Rayleigh fading channels is investigated. It is shown that the solution to this problem can be related to previous results [Vitetta and Taylor, 1994] and leads to the implementation of a receiver structure based on the Viterbi algorithm and employing per-survivor processing. The error rate performance of this receiver is evaluated by means of computer simulations for both trellis-coded and uncoded systems.