Imperfect phase and timing transfer effects on MSK and OQPSK signals

This paper investigates the effect of synchronization (phase and timing) error on the bit error rate performance of MSK and OQPSK signals assuming a wideband linear channel. At the receiver, optimum detection can be achieved via a cross correlator which correlates the received signal with a preselected symbol shape. It can be shown that the cross correlator response to the signaling symbol is more pointed at the origin for OQPSK than MSK causing an inferior behavior for OQPSK in presence of synchronization imperfection. The comparison between MSK and OQPSK systems has been quantified by anyalytically computing and plotting the average error probability of the link.