Design of Signal Constellations in the Presence of Phase Noise

In order to save the limited bandwidth resource, high-order M-ary amplitude and Phase Shift Keying (APSK) signal constellation as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is widely used in modern bandwidth-limited communication and broadcasting systems. However, such dense constellation tends to be very sensitive to the disturbance of noise, including not only white Gaussian noise but also phase noise which is caused by many nonideal factors in transmitter, receiver and channel. This paper extended a classical constellation optimization algorithm in white Gaussian noise to the context where phase noise is considered as well. And through the proposed algorithm, a 64 points signal constellation with outstanding performance is obtained. Simulation indicates the symbol error performance of the new constellation is not only 6dB better than QAM at error rate of 10^-3 in phase noise of 0.1rad, but also comparative with QAM when only white Gaussian noise is considered.