Beyond Powers of Two: Hexagonal Modulation and Non-Binary Coding for Wireless Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores hexagonal modulation combined with non-binary coding to enhance energy efficiency and spectrum utilization in wireless systems, overcoming implementation challenges associated with traditional binary-based modulation schemes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system integrating hexagonal modulation with non-binary coding, compatible with binary data, and demonstrates its advantages through SDR prototype and simulations.

Findings

Improved energy efficiency over traditional QAM.

Enhanced spectrum utilization with hexagonal modulation.

Feasibility confirmed via SDR implementation.

Abstract

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is widely employed in modern wireless communication systems to improve the transmission efficiency by adjusting the transmission rate according to the channel conditions. Thus, AMC can provide very efficient use of channel resources especially over fading channels. Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is an ef- ficient and widely employed digital modulation technique. It typically employs a rectangular signal constellation. Therefore the decision regions of the constellation are square partitions of the two-dimensional signal space. However, it is well known that hexagons rather than squares provide the most compact regular tiling in two dimensions. A compact tiling means a dense packing of the constellation points and thus more energy efficient data transmission. Hexagonal modulation can be difficult to implement because it does not fit well with the usual power- of-two symbol sizes employed with binary data. To overcome this problem, non-binary coding is combined with hexagonal modulation in this paper to provide a system which is compatible with binary data. The feasibility and efficiency are evaluated using a software-defined radio (SDR) based prototype. Extensive simulation results are presented which show that this approach can provide improved energy efficiency and spectrum utilization in wireless communication systems.