Performance of joint phase and data MLSE for TCM in phase noise channels

As communication extends to higher carrier frequencies, the phase noise problem becomes more severe and conventional phase tracking methods become inadequate. Jointly Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (JMLSE) phase tracking and decoding is a practical tracking method achieving near optimal performance. There is a lack of an analytical tool for performance evaluation of coded JMLSE. In this paper we will present a novel approximated union bound on the performance of the JMLSE receiver for trellis coded MPSK and Wiener phase noise. Our analysis leads to an equivalent model of the JMLSE process which gives important insights. Since the union bound requires the summation of infinite number of error event, we introduce an efficient algorithm for selecting the error events with the significant contribution. The developed tool is usually tight and efficient, hence can be instrumental in finding codes which achieve low error rate on high phase noise channels.