Digital modulation techniques for mobile and personal communication systems

This paper describes in detail various digital modulation techniques for mobile and personal communication systems. Among others, these include 1C 14-shift quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), used in the second generation digital cellular mobile systems in North America and Japan, and Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK), employed in the GSM system in Europe. It then briefly discusses the current research activities in modulation schemes for future systems.
adjacent channels. The latter disadvantage can be circumvented by using linear power amplifiers but these have poor power efficiency. Hence, a trade-off among all the above features must be adopted. In this paper, the power efficient QPSK, OK-QPSK, 1!'!4-shiftQPSK and GMSK modulation techniques are first described and then the modulation techniques for future DCM systems are discussed.
2

by A. H. Aghvami
The choice of modulation technique has a direct impact on the capacity of a digital cellular mobile (DCM) communication system. It determines the bandwidth efficiency of a single physical channel in terms of the number of bits per second per hertz (bit/s/Hz) and it is therefore important that this choice is discussed in detail. In selecting a suitable modulation scheme for a DCM system, consideration must be given to achieving the following: • high bandwidth efficiency • high power efficiency • low carrier-to-cochannel interference pdwer ratio (CCI) • low out-of-band radiation • low sensitivity to multi path fading
1 Introduction

• •

constant or near constant envelope low cost and ease of implementation.

To optimise all these features at the same time is not possible as each has its practical limitation and also is related to the others. For example, to achieve high bandwidth efficiency one may choose to use high-level modulation. However, if this is done two consequent disadvantages are introduced. Firstly, the power efficiency of the system is reduced. Secondly, the bandlimited high-level modulated signal has a large envelope variation which, when the signal is passed through a power efficient nonlinear amplifier, generates large out-of-band radiation; this, in turn, introduces interference to
inphase branch

(QPSK) systems Quadrature PSK (also referred to as 4-ary PSK or 4-phase PSK) modems (modulator! demodulators) are extensively employed in operational satellite communication systems. The block diagram of a conventional QPSK modulator is shown in Fig. 1. The input unipolar binary stream at a bit rate of 1;, is converted into two bit streams (inphase and quadrature streams), each having a bit rate of =fb!2 (the symbol rate) by a serial-toparallel (SIP) converter. The two unipolar-to-bipolar (V!B) converters convert these two streams into two bipolar (± 1) binary signals, which are passed through two spectrally shaped lowpass filters and then modulated by the inphase and quadrature carriers. The modulation operation uses the double-sideband suppressed-carrier amplitude

Quadrature

phase shift keying

t.

quadrature branch

QPSK modulator
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o
incoming

bit stream

a,

inphase

bit stream

quadrature
bit stream

Operation of serial-to-parallel converter

modulation (DSS-SC-AM) technique. The two modulated signals (each of which can be considered as a binary PSK signal) are combined to give a QPSK signal. Finally, the QPSK signal is filtered at the output of the modulator to limit further its power spectrum; this prevents spill-over into adjacent channels and also removes out-of-band spurious signals caused by the modulation operations. It should be noted that the spectrally shaped filters can also be implemented as a bandpass filter at the output of the modulator. In this case, the lowpass filters shown in the block diagram are not required.

Fig. 2 illustrates the operation of the SIP converter. In QPSK systems, the modulated signal has four distinct phases (n/4, 3n14, 5nl4 and 7nI4), each representing one symbol. Each symbol contains 2 bits of information. The mapping of the bits into symbols is frequently done in accordance with the Gray code. This code ensures that a single symbol in error corresponds to a single bit in error. The constellation (signal-space diagram) of a Gray-coded unfiltered QPSK signal is shown in Fig. 3. This Figure shows that the carrier phase during any symbol interval can be anyone of the four

phases n14, 3n14, 5Jr/4 and 7nl4 depending on the values of the inphase and quadrature components during that interval. Fig. 4 gives the block diagram of a coherent QPSK demodulator. The input bandpass filter removes the out-of-band noise and adjacent channel interference. The signal at the output of the filter is split into two parts. each part being coherently demodulated with the inphase and quadrature carriers. The two outputs are lowpass filtered and applied to one-bit analogue-to-digital (NO) converters to regenerate the inphase and quadrature baseband signals. These two streams are finally recombined in a parallel-toserial (P/S) converter to give the original bit stream. The carrierrecovery circuit provides inphase and quadrature carriers which are in synchronism with the received unmodulated signal. i.e. which have the same frequency and phase as the unmodulated inphase and quadrature carriers. The symbol timing recovery circuit provides the timing required to operate the two ND converters, which must be in synchronism with the received baseband signals. Differential encoding/decoding for QPSK Most practical carrier recovery circuits introduce a phase ambiguity into the recovered carrier. In the case of QPSK, a four-phase ambiguity may occur, causing a considerable bit error rate.' To remove this phase ambiguity, a differential encoder may be employed in the modulator and a differential decoder in the demodulator. Differential encoding, ensures that the changes in the phases of the transmi tted carrier represen t the information bits. Table 1 shows the phase shifts (phase advances) required for a QPSK signal to transmit all possible pairs of the information bits. The encoder can be implemented using logic circuits or look-up tables. The operation of a QPSK differential encoder is given in Table 2, where a, and b,

quadrature

(0,1)

/'

<,

,(1,1)

3Jr

4/

,4
K

I
\
\
(0,0)' 5!l' <, //(1,0)

inphase

/
/

Table 1 Phase shifts in differential encoding

7"

---

Information

bits

Phase shift

00 01
11
3
126

n/2 3n/2
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Constellation of Gray-coded QPSK signal ELECTRONICS

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carrier recovery circuit received QPSK signal recovered bit stream

Coherent QPSK demodulator

are the kth uncoded inphase and quadrature symbols, respectively, at the output of the SIP converter, I, and O, represent the kth differentially encoded symbols, and [k-1 and Ok-1 are the kth differentially encoded symbols delayed by the symbol duration (T, = 2Tb). In the case of differentially encoded QPSK (DEQPSK), the decoding operation is the inverse function of the encoding. For differential QPSK (DQPSK), the decoding operation is performed on the received modulated signal, thus avoiding the use of a carrier recovery circuit. Fig. 5 shows a (lifferential QPSK demodulator block diagram.

where C is the average signal power normalised across a 1 Q resistor and Tb = lit;, is the bit duration.

Table 2 Differential operation for QPSK

encoder

ak
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 I I

b,
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 I I 0 0 0 0

[1_1

Ok-I
0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 I 0 0 I 1 0

t,
0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0

Ok
0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 I 0 0

Spectrum and spectral efficiency o{ OPSK signals

The power spectral density of an unfiltered QPSK is of the form:

0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 I

Assuming that the modulator employs a spectrally shaped filter having a square root of a raisedcosine function with a roll-off factor of a (for optimum performance), the filtered spectrum of a QPSK signal can easily be obtained, and is as shown in Fig. 6. The spectral efficiency of a modulation scheme is defined as the ratio of the bit rate to the bandwidth, {JB, expressed in bit/s/Hz. In the case ofQPSK, the bandwidth of the signal is (1 + alL as in Fig. 6. Hence, its spectral efficiency is:
1JQPSK

S(n

= 4CTb [sin 2nC{-{,)Tb

2Jr ({- r;.)T"

(1)

I 1 1

0 0 1

since For the minimum bandwidth case (a = 0), the theoretical spectral efficiency of QPSK systems is 2 bit/s/Hz. It is now possible to realise practical filters with a roll-off factor as low as a = O· and hence a spectral 2

13 = (1 + t. = t~!2·
=

{b

t;,

a) t,

l+a

(2)

one-bit

AID
converter

va
0<."V

0<.-

PIS converter

one-bit

AID
converter

Block diagram of QPSK differential demodulator

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r\
a __
L~ ~ __
_Y ~ __ ~_L __

efficiency of 1·7bit/s/Hz can be achieved in practice.

'.·1
__~~__~ _

.-L___~~

t; -

fs

I I I

t,

I I I I I
I

fc+

t,

frequency

f-!'_
c

II II

II II

Error probability perfurmance of QPSK systems The performance of a QPSK system in the presence of system impairments may be measured by its symbol error probability (symbol error rate) or bit error probability (bit error rate). The symbol error probability of a system is defined as the average probability of signalling elements of the received signal being in error (phase error in the case of PSK systems). The bit error probability of a system is defined as the average probability of the received bits being in error. In the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) only and for transmission free of intersymbol interference (IS!), the expression for the symbol error probability of a QPSK system is:
PE=erfc

(-(I

-a)t

[~(t)

r
=

(3)

where CIN is the carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) and erfct-) is the complementary error function given by: erfctz)
=

1 - erftz)

6 Power spectral densities of unfiltered and filtered QPSK signal: (a) unfiltered QPSK spectrum; (b) amplitude response of raised-cosine function with roll-off factor a and amplitude equaliser; (c) filtered QPSK spectrum

irJ
z

e- dx

x2

0 -10

-20 cc
"0

In practical measurements, it is convenient to measure the CNR. However, the bit energy (Eb) to noise power spectral density (No) ratio (EJNo) is a very useful parameter when various modulation schemes are compared. Assuming that the filtering strategy of the system satisfies the Nyquist criterion, a general relation between these two parameters for M-ary modulation schemes is given by:
(~) =

'in
c:

i-

-30

10g,M (~)

(4)

"0

"§ U
QJ

'"

-40

In the case of QPSK, M = 4 and

(~) =2

<IJ C.

'" ~ a
0.

(;;0)

(5)

-50 -60

linear

-70

By putting eqn.5 into eqn.3 the symbol error rate of a QPSK system as a function of EJNo is obtained as:

~
PE = erfc (~)
2 (f - f, )T, 3 4 5

(6)

7 Spectrum spreading of bandlimited QPSK signal at output of TWTA operating at saturation"

128

Relationship of the bit error rate, Pc, and symbol error rate, PE For Gray-coded M-ary modulation schemes the relationship between these two figures of merit can be easily
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r------,
unipolar to bipolar
converter

sinusoidal: : pulse : shaping

I
L

i
.J

unipolar

to bipolar
converter

OK-QPSK and MSK modulator

(--- for MSK only)

quadrature

derived as: 1 P, = 10g,M PE

(7)

In the case of the QPSK system we have: . liz

PE

'hPF

V,erfc (~:)

(8)
inphase

The BER performance of QPSK signals through nonlinear channels depends on the type of filtering and the amount of power amplification. A detailed treatment of the subject is given in Reference 2. Offset-keyed QPSK (OK-QPSK) Most digital radio transmission systems today operate their main high power amplifiers (HPAs) near to or at saturation for maximum power efficiency. For this operating mode, the HPA introduces nonlinear amplitude and phase distortions. One of the damaging effects of these nonlinearities is the spectral spreading of the transmitted signal, which increases undesirable interference to the adjacent channels (adjacent channel interference). Because of their large phase transitions (± 90°, ± 180°) QPSK signals, when bandlimited, have large envelope variations (up to 100%). As a result, when a bandlimited QPSK signal passes through a nonlinear amplifier operating at saturation, there is almost a total regeneration of the filtered sidelobes to their unfiltered levels (nearly 100% spectral spreading). Fig. 7 illustrates the spreading of a bandlimited QPSK
ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATION

9 Signal constellation system

of" /4-QPSK

signal by a nonlinear amplifier operating at saturation. The channel roll-off is assumed to be 40% (a = 0-4).3 For nonlinear systems, alternative modulation schemes with smaller phase transitions have been proposed. OK-QPSK signals have ± 90° phase transitions. As a result, bandlimited OK-QPSK signals have a 33% envelope variation and hence, when they are transmitted through a nonlinear HPA, there is

less spectral spreading than in the case of a bandlimited QPSK signal." A block diagram of an OK-QPSK modulator is shown in Fig. 8. The modulator is identical to the QPSK one except that the quadrature stream is delayed with respect to that in the in phase branch by one bit interval. The OK-QPSK demodulator is also identical to the QPSK one but with the inphase branch shifted with respect to the quadrature stream by Tb seconds just before the PIS converter (see Fig. 4). For linear systems, the bit error rate and power spectral density of the OK-QPSK svstem are the same as those of QPSK systems. This modulation scheme has been proposed for aeronautical and land mobile satellite communication systems. 4
7r

14-shift QPSK

tt 14-shift QPSK was first

introduced by Baker in 1962.5 It is a compromise between QPSKand offset-keyed QPSK (OK-QPSK) in the sense that it has a maximum phase change of 135° compared to

band limited rr/4-shift

QPSK

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n /4-shift QPSK modulator JOURNAL JUNE 1993 129

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(fJ

~ >
c:

Q;

CL8

1,_,0,-1,°,-,

0,L----

__

..J

11

Baseband differential detector

1800 for QPSK and 900 for OKQPSK. Hence, bandlimited n 14-shift QPSK has less envelope fluctuation than bandlimited QPSK but more than that of OKQPSK. The main advantage of n 14-shift QPSK is that it can be non coherently detected (by a differential detector or by an FM discriminator), which is not the case for OK-QPSK. Also, in the presence of multipath fading, it outperforms OK-QPSK. For these reasons, it has been selected for the Japanese and American second generation cellular digital mobile radio systems. In an 14-QPSK modulator, signalling elements of the modulated signal are selected in turn from two QPSK constellations which are shifted by n/4 with

respect to each other, as shown in Fig. 9. The modulator block diagram is shown in Fig. 10. The input bit stream is converted by a serial-toparallel (SIP) converter into two parallel streams (ab b,), each with a symbol rate equal to half that of the incoming bit rate. The kth inphase and quadrature pulses (Ik and Qk) at the output of the signal mapping circuit are determined by their previous pulse levels, /,_1 and Q'_I' and the input symbols and b, as given by

Table3

function of information nl4-shift QPSK Information bits

Phase shifts as a bits for

Phase shift

0
1 1 0

1 1

n 14 3n/4 5n/4 7n/4

a,

I, = Ik_Icos Ok - Qk-Isin Ok Q,
=

h_Isin 0,

+ Qk-I

cos Ok to the to

Table 3. The rest of the modulator is identical to that of a QPSK modulator. To demodulate the tt /4-shift QPSK, we may use one of the following differential detection methods:

ak and b., in turn, are related

(a)

phase shift changes of the modulated signal according

Baseband differential detection: In this method, the

differential decoding is performed on the recovered inphase and quadrature baseband signals as shown in Fig. 11. It requires local oscillators but, since the phase error is removed by differential detection at baseband, phase coherence is not needed. IF differential detection: Fig. 12 shows the block diagram of an IF differential detector for tt 14-shift QPSK. Differential decoding is performed on the received IF signal using a delay line and two mixers and hence no local oscillator is needed in the receiver.

(b)

(c)
12 IF differential detector

Limiter FM discriminator detection: The block diagram

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-13

- _F r-

limiter

FM
discriminator

r-

integrate and dump

PIS converter

Limiter FM discrimator detector

of an FM discriminator detector is shown in Fig. 13. The FM discriminator extracts the instantaneous frequency deviation of the received signal. The integrateand-dump circuit integrates the frequency deviation over each symbol duration, the integral being the phase difference between two sampling instants. Finally, the 4-level threshold comparator detects the output phase difference. It has been shown that these schemes have practically the same performance in the presence of cochannel interference and Gaussian noise if the circuit elements are properly designed." The modulation adopted for the American digital cellular mobile (DCM) communication system (IS54) is n"/4-shift QPSK with a roll-offfactor of a=0·35. The burst transmit signal with a bit rate of 48·6 kbit/s through a 30 kHz channel bandwidth gives a spectral efficiency of 1·62 bit/s/Hz for this system. For the Japanese DCM system a n/4-shift QPSK modulation with a roll-off factor of a=0·5 is used. The burst transmission bit rate and the physical channel bandwidth are 42 kbit/s and 25 kHz, respectively. This gives a bandwidth efficiency of 1·68 bit/s/Hz, Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) Minimum shift keying (MSK) is a special case of binary continuousphase frequency shift keying (FSK) with a modulation index of O: 5 or with a frequency deviation of 1!.f=f,-fI= 1 2 4T" where and [, are two discrete frequencies of the MSK signal representing logic states 1 and 0, 5

respectively, and Tb is the bit duration. The MSK modulator can be implemented using a voltagecontrolled oscillator (VCO)' or a quadrature form similar to that of OK-QPSK. In the latter case, the rectangular shaped pulses before the two multipliers are converted to half-sinusoidal waveforms by two sinusoidal pulse shaped filters as shown in Fig. 8. The demodulator mav also use coherent detection sini'ilar to that of OK-QPSK. For linear systems, the bit error rates of QPSK, OK-QPSK and coherent MSK are identical. An unfiltered MSK signal has a constant envelope and also a faster spectral roll-off than QPSK or OK-QPSK but its main-lobe

bandwidth is 1·5 times wider (see Fig. 14). For higher bandwidth efficiency and sharper cut-off, an MSK signal should be filtered before transmission. This introduces envelope variations of the bandlimited signal and as a result, when it is passed through a nonlinear high-power amplifier, its filtered power spectral density spreads. This may cause undesirable interference to the adjacent channels (adjacent channel interference). However, if a Gaussian-shaped filter is used for filtering the transmitted signal, the constant envelope property of the signal can be kept, since a pre modulation lowpass filter (LPF) with Gaussian-shaped transfer

QPSK/OK-QPSK

"\

\I I'
I

II II

, l'
\ 1/

I I I

,
I I I I I

I
I
I

-70 -80 -90 -100

I
I I I I

I I

,
1

I I
I f,-

u,

fd

f,f,

t,

fc+ t,

(+ f,+ ~f,

u,

frequency

t;

14

Unfiltered power spectral densities of QPSK, OK-QPSK and MSK signals JOUR"IAL JUNE 1993 131

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hit)

voltagecontrolled GMSK

data

QPSK of the American and Japanese systems. However, there is no evidence that this system achieves the required out-or-band radiation, i.e. <-60 dBr. So far none of the proposed schemes meet all the requirements and clearly further work is needed. References
1 FEHER, K.: 'Digital communications: Satellite/earth station engineering' (Prentice-Hall, 1981) 2 MURAKAMI, S., FURUYA, Y., MATSUO, Y., and SUGIYAMA, M.: 'Modulation scheme comparative study for nonlinear satellite channels'. Proceedings IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications, ICC 78, pp.19.2.1-19.2.5, June 1978 3 AGHVAMI, A.H.: 'Digital Radio Communication Systems Vol. 1 '. Lecture notes for short course, King's College London, September 1988 4 HUANG, J., and FEHER, K: 'Performance of QPSK, OK-QPSK and MSK through cascaded nonlinearity and bandlimiting'. Proceedings IEEE Int. Conf. on Communications, ICC 79, June 1979 5 BAKER, P.A.: 'Phase-modulation data sets for serial transmission at 2000 and 2400 bits per second, Part 1', AlEE

15

GMSK modulator

voltage controlled
oscillator

GMSK

Trans. on Communications Electronics,

16

PLL-TYPE

GMSK modulator

function is easily realised. A simple method for the modulator is to use a VCO directly with a premodulation Gaussian-shaped LPF as shown in Fig. 15. The impulse response of the filter is given by:
h(t) = e:'

222/
/20

aT'I.t (2n)

where (J = ._J (In 2)/2 7rB T and B is the 3 dB bandwidth of the filter and T the bit duration. However, it is difficult to maintain the centre frequency accurately in an acceptable range. To overcome this drawback, a PLL-type GMSK modulator can be used. The block diagram of this modulator is shown in Fig. 16.7 The coherent demodulation technique can be applied to GMSK in a similar way as to simple MSK. The Pan-European digital cellular mobile communication system (GSM) employs GMSK modulation withBT = 0·3. Transmitting a 270 kbit/s burst signal through a 200 kHz bandwidth results in a bandwidth efficiency of I·35 bit/s/Hz for this system. Because of its constant envelope, it is possible to use simple and power efficient Class C power amplifiers.'
132

Modulation techniques for future systems Considerable research is being carried out on improving the capacity of future DCM systems by using advanced modulation and channel coding.v " The objective of all these research activities is to find a modulation (FEC uncoded/coded) scheme which can meet the following criteria: • • • • bandwidth efficiency >2 bit/S/Hz power efficiency comparable to that of nl4-shift QPSK reasonable CCI out-of-band radiation <-60 dBr.

A 64 kbit/s 16-QAMmodem using a digital pilot aided technique with fade compensation has recently been reported by Sampei and Sunaga.!" This modem gives about three times better capacity than that of GMSK. Trellis-modulation schemes have also been proposed for DCM systcmS.11.12 Sampei'? has proposed a 6-channel trellis-coded 16-QAM/TDMA system. He has shown that the channel capacity of the proposed system is two times larger than that of the nl4-shift
ELECTRONICS
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July 1962 6 LIU. C.L., and FEHER, K: 'Noncoherent detection of n/4-QPSK systems in a CCI-AWGN combined interference environment'. Proceedings IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Vol. 1, May 1989, pp.83-94 7 MUROTA, K., and HlRADE, K.: 'GMSK modulation for digital mobile radio telephony', IEEE Trans., July 1981, COM-29, (7), pp.1044-1050 8 AGHVAMI, A.H., and FINES, P.: 'Modulation and channel coding techniques for digital cellular mobile communications'. Proceedings Int. Symposium on Signals, Systems and Electronics, Paris, September 1992 9 FEHER, K: 'Modems for emerging digital cellular-mobile radio system', IEEE Trans., May 1991, Vf-40, (2), pp.355-365 10 SAMPEI, S., and SUNAGA, T: 'Rayleigh fading compensation method for 16 QAM in digital land mobile radio channels'. Proceedings IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, May 1989, pp.640-644 11 BIGLIERI, E., DIVSALAR, D., McLANE, P.J., and SIMON, M.K: 'Introduction to trellis-coded modulation with applications' (MacMillan, 1991) 12 SAMPEI, S.: 'Performance of trelliscoded 16 QAM/TDMA system for land mobile communications' . Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Communications, June 1990, pp.1953-1957 ©IEE: 1993 First received 24th August 1991

The author is with the Communications Research Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK Dr. Aghvami is an lEE Member. ENGINEERING JOURNAL JUNE 1993

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