Optimization constraints on the constellation point locations may include, but are not limited to, lower and upper bounds on point location, peak to average power of the resulting constellation, and zero mean in the resulting constellation. It can be easily shown that a globally optimal constellation will have zero mean (no DC component). Explicit inclusion of a zero mean constraint helps the optimization routine to converge more rapidly. Except for cases where exhaustive search of all combinations of point locations and labelings is possible it will not necessarily always be the case that solutions are provably globally optimal. In cases where exhaustive search is possible, the solution provided by the non-linear optimizer is in fact globally optimal.
The processes described above provide examples of the manner in which a geometrically shaped constellation having an increased capacity relative to a conventional capacity can be obtained for use in a communication system having a fixed code rate and modulation scheme. The actual gains achievable using constellations that are optimized for capacity compared to conventional constellations that maximize dmin are considered below.
Gains Achieved by Optimized Geometrically Spaced Constellations
The ultimate theoretical capacity achievable by any communication method is thought to be the Gaussian capacity, CG which is defined as: CG=? log2(1+SNR)
Where signal-to-noise (SNR) is the ratio of expected signal power to expected noise power. The gap that remains between the capacity of a constellation and CG can be considered a measure of the quality of a given constellation design.