Multi-envelope 3-dimensional constellations for polarization shift keying modulation

In this paper, multi-envelope 3-dimensional (3-D) constellations for polarization shift keying modulation (POLSK) are introduced. Signal points of the constellations are on the surfaces of two concentric spheres. In the receiver, two kinds of demodulation schemes are exploited. One is the conventional coherent detection (CD) of the Stokes parameters. The other is based on the maximum-likelihood (ML) algorithm. As a result of simulation, the 16-ary cube-in-cube (CIC) constellation with the ML receiver shows the best error performance in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environment.