Multifrequency minimum shift keying

A new modulation scheme that produces a constant envelope continuous phase signal set with a compact power spectrum and power efficiency better than that of MSK is proposed. The scheme can be implemented by quadrature-carrier multiplexing of two frequency/phase modulated signals of the type NFSK/2PSK, both with the same frequency in each transmission interval, and with sinusoidal symbol shapes. The generated signal can be viewed in each transmission interval as an MSK signal at one of the N frequencies and is referred to as multifrequency minimum shift keying (MF MSK). Modulation, demodulation, and synchronization circuits are described, and the spectral properties and power efficiency on the AWGN channel are analyzed. Combining a number of attractive attributes such as constant envelope, excellent spectral properties, high power efficiency, and self-synchronization capability, the proposed modulation format lends itself to a variety of applications, one of them being the digital satellite link.< >