Combining advanced constellations and SSD techniques for optimal BICM capacity

Uniform quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) has been widely used in terrestrial broadcasting systems because it provides a high data rate although it is less resilient to noise and interference. However, the uniform pattern of the constellation points doesn´t provide the highest BICM capacity so a degree of non uniformity is needed so as to improve the BICM capacity of the system. On the other hand, due to the difficulty of some propagation scenarios in broadcasting applications signal space diversity (SSD) techniques could increase the robustness of the system. The goal of this paper is to present the performance of advanced constellation schemes and signal space diversity techniques.