Demodulation of CPFSK and GMSK Signals Using Digital Signal Processing DPLL with Sequence Estimator

Phase locked loops (PLL's) are well known as a threshold extension demodulator for analogue FM signals. This capability may lead to the low bit error rate demodulation for digital FM signals. A PLL has also its native frequency tracking ability and is suited to the demodulation of the signals having large Doppler shifts, for example signals from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. In this paper, we study the demodulation scheme of Continuous Phase FSK (CPFSK) and Gaussian filtered MSK (GMSK) signals using a Digital Signal Processing type Digital PLL (DSP DPLL). First we propose a DSP DPLL completely equivalent to an Analog PLL (APLL). Next we adopt the sequence estimation scheme to compensate the Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) associated with the finite loop bandwidth of the DSP DPLL. Through computer simulations it is clarified that the proposed DSP DPLL with sequence estimator can achieve better BER performance compared with the conventional Limiter Discriminator (LD) detection on the AWGN channel. We have also shown that the DSP DPLL with sequence estimator has excellent BER characteristics on Rician fading channels having actual large Doppler shifts