Cochannel and intersymbol interference in quadrature-carrier modulation systems

A method is presented for determining the performance of a quadrature-carrier modulation system in terms of probability of error in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise, intersymbol interference, and cochannel interference. This method has been applied to determine the error rate of several quadrature-carrier modulation systems using Butterworth receiving filters of different orders. It has been found that among the different quadrature-carrier modulation systems studied, sinusoidal frequency-shift keying seems to exhibit the best overall performance in a cochannel and intersymbol interference environment. These results are shown through a number of performance curves that provide useful data for the systems designer.