Communicating Under Channel Uncertainty

Abstract: For a single transmit and receive antenna system, a new constellation design is proposed to combat errors in the phase estimate of the channel coefficient. The proposed constellation is a combination of PSK and PAM constellations, where PSK is used to provide protection against phase errors, while PAM is used to increase the transmission rate using the knowledge of the magnitude of the channel coefficient. The performance of the proposed constellation is shown to be significantly better than the widely used QAM in terms of probability of error. The proposed strategy can also be extended to systems using multiple transmit and receive antennas.