Partial Enumerative Sphere Shaping

The dependency between the Gaussianity of the input distribution for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the gap-to-capacity is discussed. We show that a set of particular approximations to the Maxwell-Boltzmann (MB) distribution virtually closes most of the shaping gap. We relate these symbol-level distributions to bit-level distributions, and demonstrate that they correspond to keeping some of the amplitude bit-levels uniform and independent of the others. Then we propose partial enumerative sphere shaping (P-ESS) to realize such distributions in the probabilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) framework. Simulations over the AWGN channel exhibit that shaping 2 amplitude bits of 16-ASK have almost the same performance as shaping 3 bits, which is 1.3 dB more power-efficient than uniform signaling at a rate of 3 bit/symbol. In this way, required storage and computational complexity of shaping are reduced by factors of 6 and 3, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Protograph-Based LDPC Code Design for Shaped Bit-Metric Decoding

A protograph-based low-density parity-check (LDPC) code design technique for bandwidth-efficient coded modulation is presented. The approach jointly optimizes the LDPC code node degrees and the mapping of the coded bits to the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) bit-channels. For BICM with uniform input and for BICM with probabilistic shaping, binary-input symmetric-output surrogate channels for the code design are used. The constructed codes for uniform inputs perform as good as the multi-edge type codes of Zhang and Kschischang (2013). For 8-ASK and 64-ASK with probabilistic shaping, codes of rates 2/3 and 5/6 with blocklength 64800 are designed, which operate within 0.63dB and 0.69dB of continuous AWGN capacity for a target frame error rate of 1e-3 at spectral efficiencies of 1.38 and 4.25 bits/channel use, respectively.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1501.0559

Bit-interleaved coded modulation in the wideband regime

The wideband regime of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) in Gaussian channels is studied. The Taylor expansion of the coded modulation capacity for generic signal constellations at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is derived and used to determine the corresponding expansion for the BICM capacity. Simple formulas for the minimum energy per bit and the wideband slope are given. BICM is found to be suboptimal in the sense that its minimum energy per bit can be larger than the corresponding value for coded modulation schemes. The minimum energy per bit using standard Gray mapping on M-PAM or M^2-QAM is given by a simple formula and shown to approach -0.34 dB as M increases. Using the low SNR expansion, a general trade-off between power and bandwidth in the wideband regime is used to show how a power loss can be traded off against a bandwidth gain.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

On the BICM Capacity

Optimal binary labelings, input distributions, and input alphabets are analyzed for the so-called bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) capacity, paying special attention to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. For 8-ary pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and for 0.75 bit/symbol, the folded binary code results in a higher capacity than the binary reflected gray code (BRGC) and the natural binary code (NBC). The 1 dB gap between the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) capacity and the BICM capacity with the BRGC can be almost completely removed if the input symbol distribution is properly selected. First-order asymptotics of the BICM capacity for arbitrary input alphabets and distributions, dimensions, mean, variance, and binary labeling are developed. These asymptotics are used to define first-order optimal (FOO) constellations for BICM, i.e. constellations that make BICM achieve the Shannon limit -1.59 \tr{dB}. It is shown that the \Eb/N_0 required for reliable transmission at asymptotically low rates in BICM can be as high as infinity, that for uniform input distributions and 8-PAM there are only 72 classes of binary labelings with a different first-order asymptotic behavior, and that this number is reduced to only 26 for 8-ary phase shift keying (PSK). A general answer to the question of FOO constellations for BICM is also given: using the Hadamard transform, it is found that for uniform input distributions, a constellation for BICM is FOO if and only if it is a linear projection of a hypercube. A constellation based on PAM or quadrature amplitude modulation input alphabets is FOO if and only if they are labeled by the NBC; if the constellation is based on PSK input alphabets instead, it can never be FOO if the input alphabet has more than four points, regardless of the labeling.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Signal Shaping for BICM at Low SNR

The mutual information of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) systems, sometimes called the BICM capacity, is investigated at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), i.e., in the wideband regime. A new linear transform that depends on bits' probabilities is introduced. This transform is used to prove the asymptotical equivalence between certain BICM systems with uniform and nonuniform input distributions. Using known results for BICM systems with a uniform input distribution, we completely characterize the combinations of input alphabet, input distribution, and binary labeling that achieve the Shannon limit -1.59 dB. The main conclusion is that a BICM system achieves the Shannon limit at low SNR if and only if it can be represented as a zero-mean linear projection of a hypercube, which is the same condition as for uniform input distributions. Hence, probabilistic shaping offers no extra degrees of freedom to optimize the low-SNR mutual information of BICM systems, in addition to what is provided by geometrical shaping. These analytical conclusions are confirmed by numerical results, which also show that for a fixed input alphabet, probabilistic shaping of BICM can improve the mutual information in the low and medium SNR range over any coded modulation system with a uniform input distribution

Design of APSK Constellations for Coherent Optical Channels with Nonlinear Phase Noise

We study the design of amplitude phase-shift keying (APSK) constellations for a coherent fiber-optical communication system where nonlinear phase noise (NLPN) is the main system impairment. APSK constellations can be regarded as a union of phase-shift keying (PSK) signal sets with different amplitude levels. A practical two-stage (TS) detection scheme is analyzed, which performs close to optimal detection for high enough input power. We optimize APSK constellations with 4, 8, and 16 points in terms of symbol error probability (SEP) under TS detection for several combinations of input power and fiber length. Our results show that APSK is a promising modulation format in order to cope with NLPN. As an example, for 16 points, performance gains of 3.2 dB can be achieved at a SEP of 10^-2 compared to 16-QAM by choosing an optimized APSK constellation. We also demonstrate that in the presence of severe nonlinear distortions, it may become beneficial to sacrifice a constellation point or an entire constellation ring to reduce the average SEP. Finally, we discuss the problem of selecting a good binary labeling for the found constellations. For the class of rectangular APSK a labeling design method is proposed, resulting in near-optimal bit error probability.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Probabilistic Shaping for Finite Blocklengths: Distribution Matching and Sphere Shaping

In this paper, we provide for the first time a systematic comparison of distribution matching (DM) and sphere shaping (SpSh) algorithms for short blocklength probabilistic amplitude shaping. For asymptotically large blocklengths, constant composition distribution matching (CCDM) is known to generate the target capacity-achieving distribution. As the blocklength decreases, however, the resulting rate loss diminishes the efficiency of CCDM. We claim that for such short blocklengths and over the additive white Gaussian channel (AWGN), the objective of shaping should be reformulated as obtaining the most energy-efficient signal space for a given rate (rather than matching distributions). In light of this interpretation, multiset-partition DM (MPDM), enumerative sphere shaping (ESS) and shell mapping (SM), are reviewed as energy-efficient shaping techniques. Numerical results show that MPDM and SpSh have smaller rate losses than CCDM. SpSh--whose sole objective is to maximize the energy efficiency--is shown to have the minimum rate loss amongst all. We provide simulation results of the end-to-end decoding performance showing that up to 1 dB improvement in power efficiency over uniform signaling can be obtained with MPDM and SpSh at blocklengths around 200. Finally, we present a discussion on the complexity of these algorithms from the perspective of latency, storage and computations.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure