The Performance of Staggered Quadrature Amplitude Modulation in the Presence of Phase Jitter

We report on the performance of band-limited staggered quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM) in the presence of phase jitter and additive Gaussion noise. It is demonstrated that offsetting, or staggering, the in-phase and quadrature data streams by a fraction of a symbol interval improves the phase-jitter immunity of a conventional QAM data transmission system. For example, with a raised cosine pulse having unity rolloff, staggering can reduce the effective jitter variance by a factor of two. Under the constraint of no intersymbol interference, the optimum staggering epoch is shown to be half a symbol interval, and since the resulting system is equivalent to a form of vestigial sideband modulation (VSB)VSB is superior to QAM with respect to phase-jitter immunity. Using both optimum pulse design and data staggering, it is shown that the improvement over conventional QAM is proportional to the excess bandwidth. Consequently, SQAM may be warranted whenever a high-quality phase-locked loop is not used to track phase jitter. While the SQAM technique is not new, it has heretofore not been recognized as possessing the above-mentioned advantages.