A Simple Sign-Bit Probabilistic Shaping Scheme

We propose a new shaping scheme for the Gaussian channel whose complexity is approximately half the one of a binary distribution matcher (DM). The result is obtained as follows: We first show that most of the shaping gain can be obtained via a simplified version of sign-bit shaping, which uses only two non-uniform binary sources. This is achieved by considering a stepwise Maxwell-Boltzmann-like distribution of the symbols. One of the two binary sources has a parameter
$p$
close to 0. Hence, we then describe a binary DM which explicitly takes advantage of this aspect and has a negligible complexity. Since the two binary sources are used alternately with equal probability, the complexity of the proposed shaping scheme is half the one of the second binary DM.