Fourier-Bessel error performance analysis and evaluation of M -ary QAM schemes in an impulsive noise environment

The authors derive closed-form expressions for the BER (bit error rate) performance of coherent M-ary quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM) system in the presence of an additive combination of Gaussian and highly impulsive noise by using a Fourier-Bessel series expansion method. The model used for the impulse noise, which closely models atmospheric and/or ignition noise, consists of a stream of Poisson impulses with areas distributed according to a bilateral Rayleigh probability distribution function. Although the methodology is general enough to accommodate any M-ary QAM scheme, they present analytical as well as some computer simulated results for 16-, 64-, and 256-QAM systems. An almost insignificant increase of the truncation error with the increase of the modulation levels verifies that the proposed method of analysis can be a useful tool in evaluating the performance of very large-alphabet M-ary QAM systems, e.g. M⩾256