Coded Modulation Schemes for Voronoi Constellations

Journal article, 2025

Multidimensional Voronoi constellations (VCs) have been shown to be more power-efficient than quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats given the same uncoded bit error rate, and also have higher achievable information rates. However, a coded modulation scheme that sustains these gains after forward error correction (FEC) coding is still lacking. This paper designs coded modulation schemes with soft-decision FEC codes for VCs, including bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and multilevel coded modulation (MLCM), together with three bit-to-integer mapping algorithms and log-likelihood ratio calculation algorithms. Simulation results show that VCs can achieve up to 1.84 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains over QAM with BICM, and up to 0.99 dB SNR gains over QAM with MLCM for the additive white Gaussian noise channel at the bit error rate of 1.81 × 10−3 with a low decoding complexity.