Performance Analysis and Channel Capacity for Multiple-Pulse Position Modulation on Multipath Channels

Abstract

Although multiple pulse-position modulation performs well on ideal channels, its performance on multipath channels is degraded significantly. In an attempt to quantify the inherent penalty due to multipath dispersion, we evaluate upper bounds for the error probability of each modulation scheme in the presence of intersymbol interference, considering both an unequalized receiver and the optimal maximum-likelihood sequence detection receiver. We also present upper and lower bounds of the channel capacity for multiple pulse-position modulation and its variants, PPM and overlapping PPM. Numerical results show that the PPM-based schemes are significantly more sensitive to multipath dispersion than is on-off keying.