Summary: 1676 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 51, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2003
Joint Noncoherent Demodulation and Decoding for
the Block Fading Channel: A Practical Framework
for Approaching Shannon Capacity
Rong-Rong Chen, Ralf Koetter, Member, IEEE, Upamanyu Madhow, Senior Member, IEEE, and Dakshi Agrawal
Abstract--This paper contains a systematic investigation of
practical coding strategies for noncoherent communication over
fading channels, guided by explicit comparisons with informa-
tion-theoretic benchmarks. Noncoherent reception is interpreted
as joint data and channel estimation, assuming that the channel is
time varying and a priori unknown. We consider iterative decoding
for a serial concatenation of a standard binary outer channel
code with an inner modulation code amenable to noncoherent
detection. For an information rate of about 1/2 bit per channel
use, the proposed scheme, using a quaternary phase-shift keying
(QPSK) alphabet, provides performance within 1.6­1.7 dB of
Shannon capacity for the block fading channel, and is about 2.5­3
dB superior to standard differential demodulation in conjunction
with an outer channel code. We also provide capacity computa-
tions for noncoherent communication using standard phase-shift

Source: Agrawal, Rakesh - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Madhow, Upamanyu - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences; Engineering