Circularly Symmetric Companding Quantization-Inspired Hybrid Constellation Shaping for APSK Modulation to Increase Power Efficiency in Gaussian-Noise-Limited Channel

In this paper we address hybrid probabilistic-geometric constellation shaping (HCS) of amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) constellation based on the reversed model of optimal companding quantization for circularly symmetric sources with the goal to increase the constellation power efficiency in Gaussian-noise-limited channel. To empirically optimize the proposed APSK constellation such that a symbol-error rate (SER) reaches its minimum under given constraints with respect to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the prior probabilities of constellation points, for various settings of constellation parameters, we investigate SER dependence on SNR and determine the constellation parameters achieving minimum SER. The SER dependence on SNR we estimate theoretically by deriving approximate formula for SER of uncoded APSK constellation in Gaussian-noise-limited channel and practically by performing simulation. The obtained results are well-matched verifying the accuracy of approximate SER formula. The results also show that our APSK constellation outperforms some previous APSK and M-ary QAM constellations in terms of power efficiency. Thus, for SER equal to 10
^-6
the gain in power efficiency amounts up to 2.35 dB, 2.23dB and 1.64 dB compared with the maximum mutual information-optimized 4+12-APSK, 4+12+16-APSK and 4+12+20+28-APSK constellations, respectively. This means that by employing APSK constellation we propose instead the traditional APSK constellations the transmitted signal power can be reduced by a third enabling lower power consumption. The improved power efficiency of our APSK constellation makes it suitable for application in power-limited communications such as fiber-optic communications, satellite communications, power-line communications, and multiple-input multiple-output wireless transmissions.