Multilevel signaling and pulse shaping for spectrum efficiency in subcarrier multiplexing transmission

Subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) transmission has been widely used for analog video transmission in CATV systems. As digital video technology rapidly advances, there is a strong need to transmit digital video over the same SCM system. Since digital video such as HDTV requires a much larger bandwidth, multilevel signaling becomes an important approach. As the number of levels increases, however, the noise margin decreases and the system is more subject to adjacent channel interference (ACI). In this paper, we analyze the spectrum efficiency and power penalty of multilevel SCM transmission. We found that using pulse shaping can make multilevel signaling attractive. Depending on the ACI that can be tolerated, results show that multilevel amplitude-shift keying (ASK) of 5-7 b/symbol can give the optimum spectrum efficiency using the raised-cosine pulse. The price paid is a slight power penalty of 0.4 dB to reduce intersymbol interference (ISI) to zero