Capacity of AM-PSK on partially coherent fading channels

This paper presents numerical capacity curves for two discrete complex channels: (1) a slow-fading Rayleigh channel with discrete carrier tracking by a phase-locked loop (PLL), where the PLL SNR is proportional to the fading amplitude squared, and (2) a fast-fading Rician channel with carrier phase estimation for the line-of-sight path only. Both channel models assume independent fading of successively received symbols. Capacity calculations are performed for equiprobable signaling with 8-ary and 16-ary amplitude-modulated phase-shift-keyed (AM-PSK) constellations. On the Rayleigh channel, the AM-PSK constellations give gains between 2 and 9 dB over PSK, at SNRs between 5 and 40 dB. For the Rician channel, AM-PSK gives a capacity gain over PSK of up to 0.75 bit at high SNR.