  Soft noncoherent detection, which relies on calculating the \textit{a
posteriori} probabilities (APPs) of the bits transmitted with no channel
estimation, is imperative for achieving excellent detection performance in
high-dimensional wireless communications. In this paper, a high-performance
belief propagation (BP)-based soft multiple-symbol differential detection
(MSDD) framework, dubbed BP-MSDD, is proposed with its illustrative application
in differential space-time block-code (DSTBC)-aided ultra-wideband impulse
radio (UWB-IR) systems. Firstly, we revisit the signal sampling with the aid of
a trellis structure and decompose the trellis into multiple subtrellises.
Furthermore, we derive an APP calculation algorithm, in which the
forward-and-backward message passing mechanism of BP operates on the
subtrellises. The proposed BP-MSDD is capable of significantly outperforming
the conventional hard-decision MSDDs. However, the computational complexity of
the BP-MSDD increases exponentially with the number of MSDD trellis states. To
circumvent this excessive complexity for practical implementations, we
reformulate the BP-MSDD, and additionally propose a Viterbi algorithm
(VA)-based hard-decision MSDD (VA-HMSDD) and a VA-based soft-decision MSDD
(VA-SMSDD). Moreover, both the proposed BP-MSDD and VA-SMSDD can be exploited
in conjunction with soft channel decoding to obtain powerful iterative
detection and decoding based receivers. Simulation results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in DSTBC-aided UWB-IR systems.
