BER Performance of a Hierarchical APSK UEP System over Nakagami-m fading

Bit error rate (BER) performance studies of amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) have not looked at the unequal error protection (UEP) facility provided by such a modulation scheme. In this paper hierarchical 16-APSK is studied using a bit allocation mechanism that allows for UEP for two classes of multimedia traffic. Theoretical BER expressions are derived for two UEP bit streams using the nearest neighbourhood method in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Nakagami-m fading channels. Simulation results are then used to validate the accuracy of the theoretical expressions. A low complexity maximum likelihood (ML) detection for hierarchical 16-APSK is also proposed and simulation results show that the proposed low complexity ML detector achieves the same BER performance as the optimum ML detector.