Symbol Error Rate (SER) Performance of a Mobile Handheld Device in On-Axis Rotational Motion

Abstract

Wireless communication systems commonly use Rayleigh distribution to model a non-line of sight multipath channel. With the consideration of on-axis rotation, the probability of symbol error can be described by a different probability distribution. This study presents an evaluation of the Symbol Error Rate (SER) performance of M-ary Phase Shift Keying (MPSK) and M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (MQAM) in a mobile handheld device with random on-axis rotational motion using an extended Saleh and Valenzuela (S&V) channel model through simulations. The on-axis rotational motion pertains to the pitch and roll movement with respect to the mobile's embedded antenna. Furthermore, the SER performance of the MPSK and MQAM in Weibull distribution are derived and compared to the SER performance of the simulated system. The results show that the SER performance curves of the simulated system are not far from to the derived Weibull equations for MPSK and MQAM. Hence, the Weibull distribution is best to characterize the impairments caused by the on-axis rotational motion in a non-line of sight multipath propagation.