Design of Spiral Constellations for Phase Noise Channels

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the design of spiral constellations for channels affected by phase noise. The strength of the proposed constellations resides both on the performance and on the extreme simplicity of the design. The symbols can in fact be expressed in analytical form, and are uniquely defined through a single parameter that accounts for the phase and thermal noise variances. The performance of the proposed constellations are assessed in terms of information rate and error rate. Despite their simplicity, the new spiral constellations have excellent performance, especially when the constellation size grows large.