Simplified Viterbi processors for the GSM Pan-European cellular communication system

The GSM cellular system provides the European countries with a common digital mobile radio structure for overland communications. This paper illustrates an implementation of a GSM receiver in which two reduced complexity Viterbi processors are used: the first one for the demodulation of the GMSK signal and the second one for the decoding operations. The performance of the receiver is evaluated through a channel simulator for mobile communications. The results show that in many cases the proposed receiver allows the significant reduction of the computation complexity with respect to the classical Viterbi processor. In particular, for mean and high signal-to-noise ratios, a reduction of four times in the computational burden is obtained.