BER Analysis of Dual Carrier Modulation Based on ML Decoding

In this paper, we consider dual carrier modulation (DCM) used in multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) standard. At the transmitter, DCM transforms two successive QPSK symbols to two 16-QAM symbols with a certain mapping and they are decoded at the receiver by the maximum likelihood (ML) rule. When the QPSK symbols are transformed into two 16-QAM symbols, the original proposed form is to use two different mappings which is not Gray mapping but optimized in the sense of the bit error rate (BER). In this paper we study the DCM by providing the intuition behind the idea of DCM from the constellation of the ML decoded signals and the exact BER analysis over AWGN and simulation BER examples over Rayleigh fading channels