Low-cost implementation techniques for generic square and cross M-QAM constellations

Abstract

This work aims at introducing techniques with reduced computational complexity for hardware implementation of high order M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) which may be feasible for broadband communication systems. The proposed techniques cover both square and cross M-QAM constellations (even and odd number of bits), hard decision rule, derivation of low-order M-QAM constellations from high order ones. Performance analyses, in terms of bit error rate (BER) is carried out when the M-QAM symbols are corrupted by either additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) or additive impulsive Gaussian noise (AIGN). The bit error rate performance results show that the performance loss of the proposed techniques is, on average, less than 1 dB, which is a remarkable result. Additionally, the implementation of the proposed techniques in field programmable gate array (FPGA) device is described and outlined. The results based on FPGA show that the proposed techniques can considerably reduce hardware resource utilization. A remarkable improvement in terms of hardware resource utilization reduction is achieved by using the generic M-QAM technique in comparison with the enhanced heuristic decision rule (HDR) technique and a previously designed technique, the HDR technique. Based on the analyses performed, the enhanced HDR technique is less complex than the HDR technique. Finally, the numerical results show that the generic M-QAM technique can be eight times faster than the other two techniques when a large number of M-QAM symbols (e.g., > 1000) are consecutively transmitted.