Joint Viterbi detection and decoding algorithm for bluetooth low energy systems

Abstract

An efficient joint Viterbi detection and decoding (JVDD) algorithm for a bluetooth low energy (BLE) system is proposed. Since the convolutional coded Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK) signal is specified in the BLE 5.0 standard, two Viterbi processors are needed for detection and decoding. However, the proposed JVDD scheme uses only one Viterbi processor by modifying the branch metric with inter-symbol interference information from GMSK modulation; therefore, the hardware complexity can be significantly reduced without performance degradation.