Impact of non-ideal phase reference on soft decoding of differentially encoded modulation

The performance of coded modulation schemes based on the concatenation of a forward-error correction (FEC) code and differentially encoded quadrature amplitude modulations (QAMs) in the presence of Wiener phase noise is considered. Log-likelihood ratios, required to perform soft decoding, are first derived for the case in which the phase of the received carrier is assumed to be perfectly known, and then used to obtain the performance for nonideal reference of phase. Simulation results of the post-FEC bit-error rate are presented for a near-Shannon limit low-density parity check code with an overhead of 20%. The performance loss, compared to ideal coherent demodulation, is evaluated for two different linewidths of the phase noise in case of quadrature-phase shift keying and 16-QAM transmission.