A friend of mine is developing a commercial OQPSK modem and was a bit stuck. I’m not surprised as I’ve had problems with OQPSK in the past as well. He called to run a few ideas past me and I remembered I had developed a coherent GMSK modem simulation a few years ago. Turns out MSK and friends like GMSK can be interpreted as a form of OQPSK.

A few hours later I had a basic OQPSK modem simulation running. At that point we sat down for a bottle of Sparkling Shiraz and some curry to celebrate. The next morning, slightly hung over, I spent another day sorting out the diabolical phase and timing ambiguity issues to make sure it runs at all sorts of timing and phase offsets.

So oqpsk.m is a reference implementation of an Offset QPSK (OQPSK) modem simulation, written in GNU Octave. It’s complete, including timing and phase offset estimation, and phase/timing ambiguity resolution. It handles phase, frequency, timing, and sample clock offsets. You could run it over real world channels.

It’s performance is bang on ideal for QPSK:

I thought it would be useful to publish this blog post as OQPSK modems are hard. I’ve had a few run-in with these beasts over the years and had headaches every time. This business about the I and Q arms being half a symbol offset from each other makes phase synchronisation very hard and does your head in. Here is the Tx waveform, you can see the half symbol time offset in the instant where I and Q symbols change:

As this is unfiltered OQPSK, the Tx waveform is just the the Tx symbols passed through a zero-order hold. That’s a fancy way of saying we keep the symbols values constant for M=4 samples then change them.

There are very few complete reference implementations of high quality modems on the Internet. Providing them has become a mission of mine. By “complete” I mean pushing past the textbook definitions to include real world synchronisation. By “high quality” I mean tested against theoretical performance curves with different channel impairments. Or even tested at all. OQPSK is a bit obscure and it’s even harder to find any details of how to build a real world modem. Plenty of information on the basics, but not the nitty gritty details like synchronisation.

The PLL and timing loop simultaneously provides phase and timing estimation. I derived it from a similar algorithm used for the GMSK modem simulation. Unusually for me, the operation of the timing and phase PLL loop is still a bit of mystery. I don’t quite fully understand it. Would welcome more explanation from any readers who are familiar to it. Parts of it I understand (and indeed I engineered) – the timing is estimated on blocks of samples using a non-linearity and DFT, and the PLL equations I worked through a few years ago. It’s also a bit old school, I’m more familiar with feed forward type estimators and not something this “analog”. Oh well, it works.

Here is the phase estimator PLL loop doing it’s thing. You can see the Digital Controlled Oscillator (DCO) phase tracking a small frequency offset in the lower subplot:

Phase and Timing Ambiguities

The phase/timing estimation works quite well (great scatter diagram and BER curve), but can sync up with some ambiguities. For example the PLL will lock on the actual phase offset plus integer multiples of 90 degrees. This is common with phase estimators for QPSK and it means your constellation has been rotated by some multiple of 90 degrees. I also discovered that combinations of phase and timing offsets can cause confusion. For example a 90 degree phase shift swaps I and Q. As the timing estimator can’t tell I from Q it might lock onto a sequence like …IQIQIQI… or …QIQIQIQ…. leading to lots of pain when you try to de-map the sequence back to bits.

So I spent a Thursday exploring these ambiguities. I ended up correlating the known test sequence with the I and Q arms separately, and worked out how to detect IQ swapping and the phase ambiguity. This was tough, but it’s now handling the different combinations of phase, frequency and timing offsets that I throw at it. In a real modem with unknown payload data a Unique Word (UW) of 10 or 20 bits at the start of each data frame could be used for ambiguity resolution.

Optional Extras

The modem lacks an initial frequency offset estimator, but the PLL works OK with small freq offsets like 0.1% of the symbol rate. It would be useful to add an outer loop to track these frequency offsets out.

As it uses feedback loops its not super fast to sync and best suited to continuous rather than burst operation.

The timing recovery might need some work for your application, as it just uses the nearest whole sample. So for a small over-sample rate M=4, a timing offset of 2.7 samples will mean it chooses sample 3, which is a bit coarse, although given our BER results it appears unfiltered PSK isn’t too sensitive to timing errors. Here is the timing estimator tracking a sample clock offset of 100ppm, you can see the coarse quantisation to the nearest sample in the lower subplot:

For small M, a linear interpolator would help. If M is large, say 10 or 20, then using the nearest sample will probably be good enough.

This modem is unfiltered PSK, so it has broad lobes in the transmit spectrum. Here is the Tx spectrum at Eb/No=4dB:

The transmit filter is just a “zero older hold” and the received filter an integrator. Raised cosine filtering could be added if you want a narrow bandwidth. This will probably make it more sensitive to timing errors.

Like everything with modems, test it by measuring the BER. Please.

Links

oqsk.m GNU Octave OQPSK modem simulation

GMSK Modem Simulation blog post that was used as a starting point for the OQPSK modem. With lots more reference links.