596 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 14, NO.

7, JULY 2010

Novel Asterisk 16QAM Constellation for COFDM

Xian Liu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Hsiao-Chun Wu, Senior Member, IEEE

2
Abstract—We propose a new QAM constellation called
A16QAM. This constellation leads to the better average SER
1.5
and the better CFM than the existing S16QAM, while having the
same OFDM PMEPR upper-bounds as S16QAM. In addition, the
OFDM PMEPR built by A16QAM is upper bounded by 4.0 and 1
2.0, if the information symbols are coded using Golay sequences
and Golay complementary pairs, respectively. 0.5

Index Terms—Constellation figure of merit, Golay sequences,

0
OFDM, PMEPR, star QAM.
−0.5
I. I NTRODUCTION

T HE quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) method

has been widely used in modern communication sys-
tems. There are several variants of QAM. Among them the
−1

−1.5

square QAM is the most popular one. However, the square

QAM relies on coherent detection. For systems in which −2
−2 −1 0 1 2
power consumption, weight, and cost are stringent, the star
QAM appears to be a good alternative since it does not Fig. 1. Constellation of A16QAM.
rely on the coherent detection [1]. Moreover, the star QAM
has the better phase-jitter immunity than the square QAM.
However, the conventional star QAM did not take any metric According to these definitions, the A16QAM constellation 𝐻
of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) into is constructed as follows:
⊕
account. Recently, we proposed a star 16QAM (to be referred 𝐻=𝐺
def
exp(𝑗𝜋/6) 𝐺. (3)
to as S16QAM) that has the restricted peak-to-mean-envelope-
power-ratio (PMEPR) of OFDM [2]. In the present work, The corresponding constellation is illustrated in Fig. 1, where
we propose a new 16QAM that has some advantages over an appropriate rotation phasor (30 degrees) has been applied
S16QAM. This new QAM will be referred to as the asterisk to (3) for the illustration purpose.
16QAM (A16QAM) throughout this Letter. One of the main
motivations is to obtain a better performance of error detection III. SER OF A16QAM
while having the same OFDM PMEPR upper-bounds.
In this section, we investigate the average symbol error rate
II. C ONSTRUCTION OF A16QAM C ONSTELLATION (SER) performance of the A16QAM constellation. In Fig. 1,
The A16QAM constellation is constructed from two QPSK each point represents a signal symbol. Let 𝑆𝑖 designate the
constellations. On the complex plane, the QPSK constellation distance between the origin and the point with index 𝑖 (𝑖 =
def def √ 1, 2, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 16). Then the ratio of the average-signal-power to
can be expressed as 𝐺 = {1, 𝑗, −1, −𝑗} where 𝑗 = −1
the average-noise-power can be expressed as follows (Eq. (6)
(throughout this Letter).
in [3]):
Definition 1: Let 𝐴 and 𝐵 be the sets of complex numbers.
Then the set sum of 𝐴 and 𝐵 is defined as 1 ∑
16
⊕ def ∣𝑆𝑘 ∣2 ,
def
𝑆𝑁 𝑅𝑎𝑣 = 𝜌 = (4)
𝐴 𝐵 = {𝑟 + 𝑤∣𝑟 ∈ 𝐴, 𝑤 ∈ 𝐵}. (1) 16𝜎 2
𝑘=1

□ where 𝜎 2 is the single-sided power spectral density of the

Definition 2: Let ℎ be a complex number and 𝐴 be the set white Gaussian noise. Since the exact SER formulas for the
of complex numbers. Then the product of ℎ and 𝐴 is defined concerned constellations do not exist, we use a union bound
as of SER widely adopted in the literature (Eq. (8) in [3]1 ):
def
ℎ𝐴 = {ℎ𝑟∣𝑟 ∈ 𝐴}. (2) 16 16
𝜎 ∑ ∑ exp[−∣𝑆𝑖 − 𝑆𝑘 ∣2 /(4𝜎 2 )]
𝑃𝑒 = √ . (5)
□ 16 𝜋 𝑖=1 ∣𝑆𝑖 − 𝑆𝑘 ∣
𝑘=1
𝑘∕=𝑖
Manuscript received March 7, 2010. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was S. Galli. The result produced by (5) is very close to the exact SER when
X. Liu is with the Department of Systems Engineering, University of 𝑃𝑒 < 10−2 [3]. It is observed from Fig. 2 that the A16QAM
Arkansas at Little Rock, USA (e-mail: xxliu@ualr.edu).
H.-C. Wu is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, leads to the lower SER than the S16QAM.
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA (e-mail: wu@ece.lsu.edu). √ √
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2010.07.100372 1 In Eq. (8) of [3], 2𝜎2 was incorrectly typed as 2𝜎.
1089-7798/10$25.00 ⃝
c 2010 IEEE
LIU and WU: NOVEL ASTERISK 16QAM CONSTELLATION FOR COFDM 597

0
10
insight is due to the greater minimum distance between two
S16QAM
symbols. It should be mentioned that the CFM of the square
10
−2
16QAM is 0.4, greater than those of both S16QAM and
Square 16QAM A16QAM.
−4
10 A16QAM

V. PMEPR OF A16QAM-OFDM
Mean SER

−6
10
Consider an OFDM system consisting of 𝑛 subcarriers. A
−8
block of bits from the input data stream is periodically mapped
10
into 𝑛 symbols of the given constellation. This mapping period
is taken as the symbol period. These 𝑛 symbols will be
denoted as 𝑐0 , 𝑐1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑐𝑛−1 in the following. Accordingly, the
−10
10
transmitted OFDM signal can be∑ represented by the real part of
𝑛−1
10
−12 a complex expression: 𝑆𝑐 (𝑡) = 𝑘=0 𝑐𝑘 exp[𝑗2𝜋(𝑓𝑟 + 𝑘𝑓𝑠 )𝑡]
14 16 18 20
Mean SNR per Symbol (dB)
22 24 where 𝑓𝑟 is the carrier frequency and 𝑓𝑠 is the bandwidth
of each sub-channel. The collection of the 𝑛 symbols forms
Fig. 2. The SER profiles. a complex vector 𝑐 expressed as 𝑐 = (𝑐0 , 𝑐1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑐𝑛−1 ). In
the OFDM literature, such a vector 𝑐 is usually called the
codeword. The power associated with each codeword 𝑐 is
IV. CFM OF A16QAM ∥𝑐∥2 . Denote by 𝐶 the ensemble of all possible codewords.
To evaluate the performance of various constellations, an- Then the mean envelope power of the transmitted signal
def ∑
other important metric is the constellation figure of merit takes the form: 𝑃𝑎𝑣 = 𝑐∈𝐶 𝑝𝑟 (𝑐)∥𝑐∥2 , where 𝑝𝑟 (𝑐) is the
(CFM), proposed in [4]. The CFM is defined as probability that codeword 𝑐 is transmitted. On the other hand,
the instantaneous envelope power is 𝑃𝑐 (𝑡) = ∣𝑆𝑐 (𝑡)∣2 . As
def 𝑑2min a result, the PMEPR of codeword 𝑐 is defined as follows:
𝑧ℵ = , (6)
𝑃0 def
PMEPR(𝑐) = max 𝑃𝑐 (𝑡)/𝑃𝑎𝑣 , where the maximization is over
where ℵ can be replaced by any constellation name, 𝑑min is the a single OFDM symbol period [5].
minimum distance between any two points in the constellation, In the following, we describe that A16QAM can re-
and 𝑃0 is the average power of the constellation. A large CFM duce PMEPR. Recall that A16QAM is constructed by two
is always preferred. By expanding (3), we have QPSK constellations. The QPSK constellation can be ex-
pressed as 𝐺 = {𝑔∣𝑔 = exp(𝑗 𝑚𝜋/2), 𝑚 = 0, 1, 2, 3}.
𝐻 = {𝑢1 , 𝑢2 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑢16 } Thus, any QPSK sequence 𝑎 = (𝑎0 , 𝑎1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑎𝑛−1 ) where
{( √ ) √ ( √ )
3 𝑗 1 𝑗 3 3 𝑗 𝑎𝑘 ∈ 𝐺, 𝑘 = 0, 1, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑛 − 1, can be uniquely asso-
= 1+ + , + , 1− − , ciated with another sequence 𝑥 = (𝑥0 , 𝑥1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑥𝑛−1 ) for
2 2 2 2 2 2
√ √ ( √ )
def
𝑥𝑘 ∈ Z4 = {0, 1, 2, 3}. According to (3), a sequence
3 𝑗 3 3 𝑗3 1 3 𝑢 = (𝑢0 , 𝑢1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑢𝑛−1 ) of A16QAM, where 𝑢𝑘 ∈ 𝐻, 𝑘 =
− , + ,− + 𝑗 1 + ,
2 2 2 2 2 2 0, 1, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑛−1, can be uniquely associated with two sequences
𝑥 = (𝑥0 , 𝑥1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑥𝑛−1 ) and 𝑦 = (𝑦0 , 𝑦1 , ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑦𝑛−1 ) such that
√ ( √ ) ( √ ) (𝑥𝑘 , 𝑦𝑘 ) ∈ Z4 × Z4 . Consequently, we can write
3 𝑗 1 3 3 𝑗
− + , +𝑗 1− , −1 + + , ( ) ( ) ( )
2 2 2 2 2 2 𝑗𝑥𝑘 𝜋 𝑗𝜋 𝑗𝑦𝑘 𝜋
√ ( √ ) √ 𝑢𝑘 = exp + exp exp , (8)
3 𝑗 3 3 𝑗 1 𝑗 3 2 6 2
− + , −1 − − ,− − ,
2 2 2 2 2 2 where 𝑘 = 0, 1, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑛 − 1. As a result, the transmitted OFDM
√ (√ ) √
3 𝑗 1 3 3 𝑗3 signal corresponding to the sequence 𝑢 of A16QAM is given
− ,− + 𝑗 − 1 ,− − , by
2 2 2 2 2 2
(√ )} 𝑛−1
1 3 ∑
−𝑗 +1 . (7) 𝑆𝑢 (𝑡) = 𝑢𝑘 exp[𝑗2𝜋(𝑓𝑟 + 𝑘𝑓𝑠 )𝑡]
2 2 𝑘=0
def
Consequently, we have = 𝑆𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡) = 𝑆𝑥 (𝑡) + exp(𝑗𝜋/6) 𝑆𝑦 (𝑡), (9)
16
1 ∑ √ where
𝑃0 = ∣𝑢𝑘 ∣2 = 2, 𝑑2min = 4 − 2 3,
16 𝑛−1
𝑘=1
def
∑
𝑑2min √ 𝑆𝑥 (𝑡) = exp(𝑗 𝑥𝑘 𝜋/2) exp[𝑗2𝜋(𝑓𝑟 + 𝑘𝑓𝑠 )𝑡],
𝑧A16QAM = = 2 − 3 ≈ 0.26795. 𝑘=0
𝑃0
𝑛−1
∑
Similarly, we can obtain the CFM of S16QAM as 𝑧S16QAM ≈ 𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)
def
= exp(𝑗 𝑦𝑘 𝜋/2) exp[𝑗2𝜋(𝑓𝑟 + 𝑘𝑓𝑠 )𝑡].
0.17160. Therefore, A16QAM has the better CFM. The main 𝑘=0
598 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 14, NO. 7, JULY 2010

Note that the instantaneous envelope power of the transmitted Therefore 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦 (𝑡) ≤ 4𝑛 since 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦+2 (𝑡) ≥ 0. □
signal given by (9) can be expressed as Theorem 2: If 𝑥 and 𝑦 are GSs but they do not necessarily
𝑃𝑢 (𝑡)
def
= 𝑃𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡) = ∣𝑆𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 form a GCP, then 𝑃𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡) ≤ 8𝑛. □
Proof: According to (11) ( and the proof above,
) we have
= ∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡) + exp(𝑗𝜋/6) 𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 . (10)
𝑃𝑥, 𝑦 (𝑡) + 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦+2 (𝑡) = 2 ∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡)∣2 +∣𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 ≤ 2(2𝑛 + 2𝑛)
= 8𝑛. Therefore 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦 (𝑡) ≤ 8𝑛 since 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦+2 (𝑡) ≥ 0. □
A. Golay Sequences and Golay Complementary Pairs Lemma 2: Let 𝑥 and 𝑦 be statistically independent se-
This subsection presents a brief introduction to Golay quences of length 𝑛. Suppose that each element of them is
sequences (GSs) and Golay complementary pairs (GCPs) [6]. equiprobable. Then the mean envelope power is 2𝑛. □
Consider a sequence 𝑠 ∈ Z𝑛4 . Its aperiodic autocorrela- Proof: Due to the statistical independence, we have
tion with displacement 𝜂 is defined as follows: 𝑅𝑠 (𝜂) =
∑ 𝔼{𝑆𝑥 (𝑡)𝑆𝑦∗ (𝑡)}=𝔼{𝑆𝑥∗ (𝑡)𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)}=0. Since both 𝑥 and 𝑦
𝑛−𝜂−1
𝑘=0 exp[𝑗(𝑠𝑘 − 𝑠𝑘+𝜂 )𝜋/2]. Two sequences 𝑥 ∈ Z𝑛4 and are equiprobable QPSK symbols, we get 𝔼{∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡)∣2 }
𝑛
𝑦 ∈ Z4 form a GCP if 𝑅𝑥 (𝜂) + 𝑅𝑦 (𝜂) = 2𝑛𝛿(𝜂), where 𝛿(𝜂) =𝔼{∣𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 } = 𝑛. Thus, we get
is the Kronecker function and 𝜂 = 0, 1, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑛−1. A sequence
is called the GS if it is a member of a GCP. The following 𝑃𝑎𝑣 = 𝔼{𝑃𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡)} = 𝔼{∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡)∣2 } + 𝔼{∣𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 } = 2𝑛. (17)
property was observed by Popovic [7]:
Lemma 1: Let 𝑥 ∈ Z𝑛4 and 𝑦 ∈ Z𝑛4 be a GCP. Denote □
def def
𝑣𝑘 = exp(𝑗𝑥𝑘 𝜋/2) and 𝑤𝑘 = exp(𝑗𝑦𝑘 𝜋/2). Consider the According to Theorems 1, 2 and Lemma 2, we obtain the
following two summations: following important theorem for the proposed A16QAM-
𝑛−1 OFDM system.
∑
𝑆𝑣 (𝑡) = 𝑣𝑘 exp(−𝑗2𝜋𝑘𝑓𝑠 𝑡), Theorem 3: Let 𝒜 ⊂ Z𝑛4 be the set of Golay sequences
𝑘=0 (complementary pairs). Then the PMEPR of A16QAM for
𝑛−1
∑ 𝒜 × 𝒜 is bounded by four (two), provided that 𝒜 × 𝒜 is used
𝑆𝑤 (𝑡) = 𝑤𝑘 exp(−𝑗2𝜋𝑘𝑓𝑠 𝑡). for equiprobable OFDM transmission. □
𝑘=0 As a result, using GCP, the PMEPR is upper-bounded by 3
Then for any 𝑡, the following inequalities hold: dB. In the literature, there was a notion of crest factor (CF)
√ √ defined as the ratio of the maximum absolute value to the root
∣𝑆𝑣 (𝑡)∣ ≤ 2𝑛, ∣𝑆𝑤 (𝑡)∣ ≤ 2𝑛. (11) mean square (rms) value. In [7] the author mentioned that,
□ using GCP, the CF which is upper-bounded by 6 dB.
The proof of Lemma 1 is based on the key property: ∣𝑆𝑣 (𝑡)∣2
+ ∣𝑆𝑤 (𝑡)∣2 = 2𝑛.
VI. C ONCLUSION

B. PMEMR of A16QAM-OFDM Coded with GSs and GCPs In this Letter, we present a new constellation-A16QAM,
For any sequence 𝑥 ∈ Z𝑛4 , we define 𝑥 + 2 = (𝑥0 + 2, 𝑥1 + which will lead to a lower symbol error rate than the conven-
2, ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ , 𝑥𝑛−1 + 2). Accordingly, we have: tional S16QAM but will maintain the same PMEPR upper-
bounds as S16QAM when both constellations are employed
𝑛−1
∑ for Golay-coded OFDM systems.
𝑆𝑥+2 (𝑡) = − exp(𝑗𝑥𝑘 𝜋/2) exp[𝑗2𝜋(𝑓𝑟 + 𝑘𝑓𝑠 )𝑡]
𝑘=0
= −𝑆𝑥 (𝑡). (12) R EFERENCES
In the following, we consider a generalized form of (10): [1] W. T. Webb and L. Hanzo, Modern Quadrature Amplitude Modulation:
2 𝑗𝛽 2 Principles and Applications for Fixed and Wireless Communications.
𝑃𝑢 (𝑡) = 𝑃𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡) = ∣𝑆𝑥,𝑦 (𝑡)∣ = ∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡) + 𝑒 𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣ , (13) IEEE Press, 1994.
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𝑃𝑥, 𝑦 (𝑡) + 𝑃𝑥, 𝑦+2 (𝑡) = 2 ∣𝑆𝑥 (𝑡)∣2 + ∣𝑆𝑦 (𝑡)∣2 = 4𝑛. (16)