BER analysis for MPAM signal constellations in the presence of fading and ADC quantization noise

In this letter, closed-form expressions for the bit error rate of M-ary pulse amplitude modulated signal constellations as a function of the analog-to-digital converter word length, the signal-to-noise ratio and the fading distribution, are derived. These results allow for a rapid and accurate evaluation of the system performance when the analog-to-digital converter resolution is limited, as is generally the case in high sampling rate communication systems, and thus provide a useful tool for system design, analysis and optimization.