An Energy Efficient QAM Modulation with Multidimensional Signal Constellation

Packing constellations points in higher dimensions, the concept of multidimensional modulation exploits the idea drawn from geometry for searching dense sphere packings in a given dimension, utilising it to minimise the average energy of the underlying constellations. The following work analyses the impact of spherical shaping of the constellations bound instead of the traditional, hyper-cubical bound. Balanced constellation schemes are obtained with the N-dimensional simplex merging algorithm. The performance of constellations of dimensions 2, 4 and 6 is compared to the performance of QAM modulations of equivalent throughputs in the sense of bits transmitted per complex (two-dimensional) symbols. The considered constellations give an approximately 0:7 dB to 1 dB gain in terms of BER over a standard QAM modulation.