An Investigation of the Impacts of Phase Noise on Symbol Error Rate in Quadrature Amplitude Modulation Systems

Abstract

The existence of phase noise in virtually every digital communications system poses a serious challenge to system designers especially as system complexity increases. Communication system complexity could be attributed to the modulation techniques adopted and the circuitry employed in achieving such modulations. This work investigates the impact of phase noise on the Symbol Error Rate (SER) of the different Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) schemes. MATLAB simulation technique is adopted for the work and the results of the simulations show that as the phase noise is increased negatively, all the QAM schemes investigated show a reduction in SER and at a point, records a zero error. The value at which the schemes record this zero symbol error rate increases as the complexity of the scheme increases. So, higher order QAM schemes accommodate more symbol errors than the lower orders. The results also show that hard decision decoding has the worst performance index, irrespective of the QAM scheme, when compared with soft decision decoding.