Non-Uniform Constellations for Broadcast and Multicast in 5G New Radio

5G New Radio (NR) is the wireless standard that will become the foundation for the next generation of mobile networks. NR implements different techniques that improve the performance in terms of data rate, coverage, reliability, latency or mobility. However, NR still has room for performance improvement in modulation, since it employs uniform Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) constellations to map information bits into complex symbols. Non-Uniform Constellations (NUC) are a practical solution to reduce the gap to Shannon. They are optimized by means of signal geometrical shaping for a specific signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and channel model. Non-Uniform Constellations (NUCs) are presented in this paper as a potential technique to be implemented in future releases of 5G NR. A novel algorithm is also introduced for the design of NUCs for specific Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS), which offer high performance gains compared to QAM. The optimized constellations provide gains up to 0.8 dB for AWGN channel.