Design of Digital Communications for Strong Phase Noise Channels

To meet the requirements of beyond 5G networks, the significant amount of unused spectrum in sub-TeraHertz frequencies is contemplated for high-rate wireless communications. Yet, the performance of sub-TeraHertz systems is severely degraded by strong oscillator phase noise. We investigate in this paper the design of digital communications robust to phase noise. This problem is addressed in three steps: the characterization of the phase noise channel, the design of the optimum receiver, and the optimization of the modulation scheme. This paper proposes a joint performance and implementation optimization. First, we address the design of the demodulation scheme for phase noise channels and propose the polar metric, a soft-decision rule for symbol detection. It is shown that performance gains are achieved for coded and uncoded systems with valuable complexity reductions of the receiver. Second, we investigate the optimization of the modulation scheme for phase noise. We demonstrate that using a constellation defined upon a lattice in the amplitude-phase domain leads to significant performance gains and a low-complexity implementation. Thereupon, we propose the Polar-QAM scheme with efficient binary labeling and demodulation. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed modulation and demodulation schemes offer valuable solutions to achieve high-rate communications on systems strongly impaired by phase noise.