Performance of the Differential Decoder Over Flat Rayleigh Fading Channel

It is well known that differential decoding can double the bit error rate (BER) before decoding in digital communication system when the BER before decoding is far less than 1. In fact, this conclusion is only suitable to the differential decoder over addition white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environment where the random error is the most. While, the performance of the differential decoder over fading environment, where the burst error may be the most, is unknown up to now. In this paper, the performance of the differential decoder over Rayleigh fading environment is considered, and the BER of the coherent demodulation of differential phase shift keying (DPSK) signal over flat Rayleigh fading channel is obtained through MATLAB software simulation and data statistics. This result can also be applied to the performance analysis of the other digital communication system with the differential decoder, such as minimum shift keying (MSK) and Gaussian filtered minimum shift keying (GMSK) modulation system, over flat Rayleigh fading channel.