Band-Sweeping M-ary PSK (BS-M-PSK) Modulation and Transceiver Design

Channel Estimation is a major problem encountered by receiver designers for wireless communications systems. The fading channels encountered by the system are usually time variant for a mobile receiver. Besides, the frequency response of the channel is frequency selective for urban environments where the delay spread is quite large compared to the symbol duration. Estimating the channel is essential for equalizing the received data and removing the Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) resulting from the dispersive channel. Hence, conventional transceivers insert pilot symbols of known values and detect the changes in it in order to deduce the channel response. Because these pilots carry no information, the throughput of the system is reduced. A Novel modulation scheme is presented in this work. The technique depends on using a carrier signal that has no fixed frequency, the carrier tone sweeps the band dedicated for transmission and detects the transfer function gain within the band. A carrier signal that is Frequency Modulated (FM) by a periodic ramp signal becomes Amplitude Modulated (AM) by the channel transfer function, and thus, the receiver obtains an estimate for the channel response without using pilots that decrease the system’s throughput or data rate. The carrier signal itself acts as a dynamic frequency domain pilot. The technique only works for constant energy systems, and thus it is applied to PSK transceivers. Mathematical formulation, transceiver design and performance analysis of the proposed modulation technique are presented. Keywords— Channel Estimation, Digital Modulation, Fading Channels, Frequency Modulation (FM), Amplitude Modulation (AM)