BICMC and TD Comparative Performance Study of 16-APSK Signal Variants for DVB-S2 Systems

A comparative performance study, in terms of Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation Capacity (BICMC) and Total Degradation (TD), between Amplitude Phase Shift Keying (APSK) signal variants for the 2nd generation Digital Video Broadcasting via Satellite (DVB-S2) system is presented. Motivated by the observation that the presence of more signal points in the outer ring of 16-APSK signals appears to improve the performance in a non-linear (NL) channel, we investigate the performance of 2-14 and 3-13 APSK signals with two novel bit-to-symbol mappings as alternatives to the 4-12 APSK, which is currently proposed as the modulation scheme for the DVB-S2 standard. Performance evaluation results are obtained for an air-interface based on this standard, which includes a Non-Linear (NL) High Power Amplifier (HPA), predistortion, raised cosine Nyquist filters and Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. Performance results have shown that the proposed 3-13 APSK signal not only achieves the best BICMC performance with higher gains occurring at high signal-to-noise ratios, but also outperforms, in terms of TD performance, all the other considered 16-ary APSK signal variants.