Gray coding for multilevel constellations in Gaussian noise

Journal article, 2007

The problem of finding the optimal labeling (bit-to-symbol mapping) of multilevel coherent phase shift keying (PSK), pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations with respect to minimizing the bit-error probability (BEP) over a Gaussian channel is addressed. We show that using the binary reflected Gray code (BRGC) to label the signal constellation results in the lowest possible BEP for high enough signal energy-to-noise ratios and analyze what is "high enough"in this sense. It turns out that the BRGC is optimal for PSK and PAM systems whenever the target BEP is at most a few percent, which covers most systems of practical interest. New and simple closed-form expressions are presented for the BEP of PSK, PAM, and QAM using the BRGC. © 2007 IEEE.