Detection in Digital Communication Systems with Phase Noise

Abstract: In every communication system, the limitations of the hardware sets a constraint on the overall system performance. More often than not, these limitations are not taken into account during the system design stage where the hardware is considered ideal. In this thesis, we address the problem of data detection in the presence of oscillator phase noise in communication systems. After discussing a model for phase noise, we study the problem of performing data detection on different systems experiencing phase noise.

In a first step, we looked at a single carrier QPSK communication system operating on an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Three estimation algorithms are proposed and compared with respect to their performance at a given signal to noise ratio (SNR).

The study is then extended to multicarrier systems. We provide an analysis of the bit error rate (BER) and a receiver algorithm for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system which experiences phase noise over an AWGN channel. In the next step, we consider a coded OFDM system employing convolutional codes operating on fading channels. Three channel models are considered. A joint phase noise-channel estimation algorithm is presented and its performance on the different channel models are discussed.