This paper presents two equalizer structures for trellis-coded continuous phase modulation (TC-CPM) on multipath fading intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. An equivalent discrete-time (DT) model is developed by combining the tapped-delay-line (TDL) model of the frequency-selective channel and by oversampling at the receiver. The (noninterleaved) fractionally spaced maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) equalizer performs continuous phase modulation (CPM) demodulation, trellis-coded modulation (TCM) decoding, and channel equalization by exploiting the finite state nature of the ISI-corrupted TC-CPM signal. Both simulation and analytical results show diversity-like improvement when performing joint MLSE decoding and equalization. For the interleaved soft-output equalizer, the soft symbol metric is delivered to the TCM decoder by using a forward and backward recursion algorithm. Three variants of the soft-output equalizer are examined. We conclude that the backward recursion is essential to partial response CPM schemes, and with moderate complexity, the soft-output equalizer can have a substantial advantage over a noninterleaved MLSE equalizer.

A noncoherent receiver is proposed for partial response trellis-coded continuous phase modulation (TC-CPM) on interleaved flat Rician-fading channels. By using a multiple-symbol observation interval and a simple metric calculator, the power efficiency is improved over a receiver that uses a single-symbol observation interval. Performance bounds on the bit error probability are derived by defining a set of characteristic distances for CPM signals, and showing that TC-CPM is equivalent to a TCM scheme. Our results show that, with the same observation length, the proposed receiver is less than 0.5 dB inferior to a coherent receiver for which perfect channel information is needed. We also conclude that in terms of joint power-bandwidth complexity, 2RC is the best candidate for rate-1/2 TCM codes.