General QAM Modulation in AWGN Channel

Transmit and receive data using a nonrectangular 16-ary constellation in the presence of Gaussian noise. Show the scatter plot of the noisy constellation and estimate the symbol error rate (SER) for two different signal-to-noise ratios.

Create a 16-QAM constellation based on the V.29 standard for telephone-line modems.

c = [-5 -5i 5 5i -3 -3-3i -3i 3-3i 3 3+3i 3i -3+3i -1 -1i 1 1i];
M = length(c);

Generate random symbols.

data = randi([0 M-1],2000,1);

Modulate the data by using the genqammod function. General QAM modulation is necessary because the custom constellation is not rectangular.

modData = genqammod(data,c);

Pass the signal through an AWGN channel having a 20 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

rxSig = awgn(modData,20,'measured');

Display a scatter plot of the received signal and the reference constellation, c.

h = scatterplot(rxSig);
hold on
scatterplot(c,[],[],'r*',h)
grid
hold off

Demodulate the received signal by using the genqamdemod function. Determine the number of symbol errors and the symbol error ratio.

demodData = genqamdemod(rxSig,c);
[numErrors,ser] = symerr(data,demodData)

numErrors = 1

ser = 5.0000e-04

Repeat the transmission and demodulation process with an AWGN channel having a 10 dB SNR. Determine the symbol error rate for the reduced SNR. As expected, the performance degrades when the SNR is decreased.

rxSig = awgn(modData,10,'measured');
demodData = genqamdemod(rxSig,c);
[numErrors,ser] = symerr(data,demodData)

numErrors = 462

ser = 0.2310