On the Statistics of the Error Propagation Effect of Binary Differential Phase-Shift Keying

Abstract

We study a traditional problem related to binary differentially coherent phase-shift keying (DPSK) modulation, where an error in a symbol tends to cause an error in the next symbol; this phenomenon is referred to as error propagation. We derive the double bit-error rate (DBER) of two successive DPSK symbols over additive white Gaussian noise and Rician fading. Our findings show that the DBER decreases as the signal-to-noise ratio increases. A tight closed-form upper bound for the average DBER over a slowly varying Rician channel is also presented to simplify the numerical evaluation.