Simple Closed-Form Approximations for Achievable Information Rates of Coded Modulation Systems

The intuitive sphere-packing argument is used to obtain analytically-tractable closed-form approximations for achievable information rates of coded modulation transmission systems, for which only analytically-intractable expressions are available in the literature. These approximations provide a number of insights, possess useful properties, and facilitate design/optimization of such systems. They apply to constellations of various cardinalities (including large ones), are simple yet reasonably accurate over the whole signal-to-noise ratio range, and compare favorably to the achieved rates of recent state-of-the art experiments.