Interleaver design for trellis-coded differential 8-PSK modulation with non-coherent detection

The effect of finite interleaver size on bit error rate (BER) performance of coded 8-DPSK is determined by means of computer simulations. The losses evaluated in this way include the SNR degradation due to the timing and frequency errors of the symbol synchronizer and the automatic frequency control (AFC) of the receiver. BER measurements are presented using a conventional 2/3 rate convolutional 8-state trellis-code for typical Rayleigh and Rician fading channels. It is shown that for a Rician channel with a Rician parameter of 7 dB, a Doppler spread of 100 Hz and a data rate of 2400 bps, an interleaver with size 16 x 16 symbols performs nearly as well as a very large interleaver. It is also shown that for very fast Rayleigh channels, the BER-curves flatten out at large SNR.