LAUSR

Differential amplitude phase shift keying (DAPSK) is a promising modulation technique for use in high-mobility environments, as it does not require channel estimation. In this paper, a novel reduced complexity soft demodulator for high-order DAPSK constellations is proposed. The main idea relies on a two-step approximation of the sum-log demapper. In the first step, a parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) decomposition is used to approximate log-likelihood ratios. Next, the basis functions obtained through the first step are approximated by piecewise-linear curves. Numerical optimization techniques are employed for the PARAFAC decomposition and its piecewise-linear approximation whose parameters are then stored in a lookup table. It has been verified through computer simulations that the proposed scheme clearly outperforms the scheme proposed in the paper “Reduced-complexity noncoherent soft-decision-aided DAPSK dispensing with channel estimation,” (IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 62, pp. 2633–2643, 2013.), while also having lower computational cost. Moreover, it is shown that the performance of the exact sum-log demapper and the proposed demapper is very close for ${\text{2}}\times {\text{4}}$ and ${\text{4}}\times {\text{16}}$ DAPSK constellations.