Design and Performance Analysis of a Novel HQAM for Telecommunication Systems

QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) formats are widely used in today's digital wireless communications systems. Most of the existing QAM constellations have adopted rectangular constellation design for higher information transmission efficiently. However, rectangular QAM constellations have unequal Euclidian distance among their adjacent constellation points in their constellation schemes, which reduces their energy efficiency. In this paper, a novel regular hexagonal QAM (hereinafter referred to as “HQAM”) is proposed to enhance the signal energy efficiency of QAM constellations. In the proposed constellation, the distribution of its constellation points is based on regular hexagon patterns, therefore the Euclidean distance among its adjacent constellation points is equal, which can make the best use of the signal transmission energy. In order to verify the proposed scheme, regular hexagonal 18QAM is used as an example. In this 18HQAM based on our proposed novel constellation formation, every 8 codes are taken as a group, and an extra 1bit information is used for parity check. Theoretical analysis shows that the novel HQAM constellation design has higher energy efficiency than that of the existing rectangular QAM constellation. The simulation results show that the SER (Symbol Error Rate) of the proposed 18HQAM is better than that of the existing 16QAM, and the information carried by every signal symbol is also more than that of the existing 16QAM. Therefore, the proposed HQAM constellation can improves the efficiency and reliability of signal transmission in digital wireless communication systems.