M-ary amplitude shift keying OFDM system

Coherent M-ary amplitude-shift keying (MASK) is proposed for use in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The frequency separation between subcarriers is only 1/2T instead of 1/T. With a slightly wider bandwidth, an √M-ary ASK OFDM can achieve the same bit-error rate (BER) of M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) OFDM and a better BER than that of M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) OFDM. The √M-ary ASK OFDM has the same peak-to-average-power ratio as that of the M-ary QAM OFDM. The MASK OFDM can be implemented digitally and efficiently by fast cosine transform and demodulated by inverse fast cosine transform. Comparisons show that implementation complexity is reduced for additive white Gaussian noise channels with the use of the new scheme.