Performance Analysis of Triangular Quadrature Amplitude Modulation in AWGN Channel

Recently, the triangular quadrature amplitude modulation (TQAM) whose signal points are regularly distributed at the vertexes of contiguous equilateral triangles was proposed. In this paper, we derive the general formula calculating the average energy per symbol of the TQAM and find out that the asymptotic power gain of the TQAM over the well-known square quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM) is 0.5799 dB. We also analyze the symbol error rate (SER) and the bit error rate (BER) of the TQAM and compare them with the error performances obtained through computer simulation. Analytical and simulation results coincide at a wide range of signal to noise power ratio (SNR). The power gain increases gradually and approaches the asymptotic value as modulation order increases and target error rate decreases.