Single-sideband phase modulation (SSBPM), in which a signal is simultaneously phase- and amplitude-modulated by a signal and its Hilbert transform, is shown to be suboptimum for binary signaling in white Gaussian noise. An alternative single-sideband technique based on the properties of binary suppressed-carrier phase modulation is proposed and shown to give performance equivalent to the double-sideband version.

An equivalence between the rank permutation codes and a new class of binary codes has been observed. A binary code may be generated by direct transformation of a permutation code. The binary codes are usually nonlinear and may be decoded by the inverse transformation and rank correlation of the equivalent permutation.

A coding scheme based on the properties of rank vectors is presented. The new codes are based on the theory of permutation groups by introducing a new notation for the group operation that simplifies the generation and decoding of desirable rank codes. The use of group theory is made possible by the introduction of the Kendall correlation coefficient as a measure of the distance between code words. This technique provides a method for the choice of rank vector code words superior to those that have been proposed in the past. Much of the terminology used in block coding can also be used to describe rank vector codes, but the actual quantities involved are quite different. The rank vector codes discussed in the paper offer the advantage of low sensitivity of the probability of error to the noise distribution because of the nonparametric character of rank vector detection schemes. Bounds that have been verified by extensive computer simulation have been derived for the probability of error.