Transmission performance of an OFDM-based higher-order modulation scheme in multipath fading channels

Abstract

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile systems are a necessary step toward successfully achieving further increases in data rates. As the use of higher-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is expected to increase data rates within a limited bandwidth, we propose a method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based 1024- and 4096-QAM transmission with soft-decision Viterbi decoding for use in 5G mobile systems. Through evaluation of the transmission performance of the proposed method over multipath fading channels using link-level simulations, we determine the bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM-based 1024- and 4096-QAM as a function of coding rate under two multipath fading channel models: extended pedestrian A (EPA) and extended vehicular A (EVA). We also demonstrate the influence of phase error on OFDM-based 1024- and 4096-QAM and clarify the relationship between phase error and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty required to achieve a BER of 1 × 10−2. This work provides an effective solution for introducing higher-order modulation schemes in 5G and beyond.