Region based error rates computations for SQAM signals in AWGN channel

Abstract

In this paper, we derive new generalized expressions to compute error rates for M-Ary square quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM) in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The proposed method uses a region based symbol error rate (SER) and bit error rate (BER) computation technique which reduces the bit error rate over the conventional method as the size of the constellation increases. For the constellation size of 1024, at 10 dB average bit energy to noise spectral density ratio (E b /N o ), BER is improved by a factor of 1.654, while for 256-QAM, the BER shows an improvement by a factor of 1.196.