A General Conditional BER Expression of Rectangular QAM in the Presence of Phase Noise

In this paper, we newly present a closed-form expression for the bit-error rate (BER) of an M-ary pulse-amplitude modulation (M-PAM) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels by analytically characterizing the bit decision regions and positions. The obtained expression is then used to derive the conditional BER of a rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for a given value of phase noise. Numerical results show that the impact of phase noise on the conditional BER performance is proportional to the constellation size. Moreover, it is observed that given a constellation size, the square QAM is more resilient to phase noise in the sense that it achieves the lowest phase noise-induced performance loss compared to other rectangular constellations.