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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 57, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

Exact Method for the Error Probability Calculation of Three-Dimensional Signal Constellations
Majid Khabbazian, Student Member, IEEE, Md. Jahangir Hossain, Student Member, IEEE, Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Senior Member, IEEE, and Vijay K. Bhargava, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractThe contribution of this letter is the computation of exact symbol error probability (SEP) of three-dimensional (3D) signal constellations over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The originality of the proposed method is that it can be applied to any arbitrary 3-D constellation whose decision regions may not meet at right angles. We express the SEP in a triple integral form which is further simplied. The simplied form requires a single integral evaluation of standard erf function. Using the derived exact SEP formula, we plot SEP for a number of selected 3-D constellations. The SEP obtained using the proposed formula is validated by simulation results. It is also compared with the union bound approximation, an upper bound for SEP. Index TermsMultidimensional signal constellation, symbol error probability, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).

The organization of the paper is as follows. Section II presents the mathematical formulation of the SEP evaluation of 3-D constellations and a method for the exact calculation of the SEP for an arbitrary signal point. In Section III, we present some selected numerical results. Finally, Section IV concludes the paper. II. P ROBABILITY OF E RROR F OR 3-D C ONSTELLATIONS A. Mathematical Formulation Let x = (x1 , x2 , x3 ) represents a transmitted signal vector taken from a 3-D constellation Z. Suppose that the signal is transmitted over an AWGN channel. Therefore, the received vector y = (y1 , y2 , y3 ) is given by y = x + w, where w = (w1 , w2 , w3 ) is a Gaussian noise vector with wi independently and identically distributed with zero mean and two-sided power spectral density N0 /2. If a signal point x is transmitted, the received signal point at the receiver can be imagined as a Gaussian random vector with mean x, and the conditional joint probability density function (JPDF) of the received Gaussian random vector can be written as [6] py (y|x) = 1 ||y x|| exp 2 )3/2 2 2 (2
2

I. I NTRODUCTION RAIG proposed in [1] a new and exact result for calculating the symbol error probability (SEP) of twodimensional (2-D) signal constellations. The presented method is simple and applicable to any arbitrary 2-D signal constellation whose decision boundaries may not necessarily meet at right angles. The approach was used in [2], [3] to compute the SEP of two-dimensional M-ary signaling over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and slow fading. Three-dimensional (3-D) signal constellations based on Euclidean space are used for reliable and efcient digital communications over an AWGN channel [4]. Examples of these signal constellations include 3-D pulse position modulation and biorthogonal modulation. In [5], exact expressions for the symbol-error rate of coherent 3-ary orthogonal signaling and 6-ary biorthogonal signaling are derived. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no result presented for the exact calculation of the probability of error for an arbitrary 3-D signal constellation. Motivated by the work in [1], we present in this letter an exact method for calculating the SEP for 3-D signal constellations. The method is applicable to any arbitrary signal constellations including those with irregular signal points decision boundaries. We reduce the SEP from a triple integral form to a single integral representation. The analytical results match perfectly with the simulation results for the considered 3-D constellations.

(1)

where ||y x|| denotes the norm of the vector (y x) and 2 = N0 W with W representing the two-sided bandwidth of the transmitted signal. B. Exact Probability of Error for Arbitrary Signal-Point Geometry For any arbitrary arrangement of signal points in 3-D subject to AWGN, the decision regions form convex polyhedrons called Voronoi regions, each of which denes a region nearest to a given signal point. There are many efcient algorithms in the literature for computing the Voronoi diagram (i.e., the collection of all Voronoi regions) of a set of points [7]. Having the Voronoi region of a signal point x, we show how to compute the probability that the received signal y falls in the the Voronoi region of x. Let denote the decision region of a signal point x by R(x). Errors occur if a received signal y falls outside R(x) when x is transmitted. Therefore, the probability of correct detection is equal to the probability of x falling inside R(x). Clearly, we can decompose R(x) into tetrahedra by connecting the signal point x to the vertices of R(x). As shown in Figure 1, each tetrahedron can also be decomposed into at most three biright-angled tetrahedra. Since all of the tetrahedra are disjoint

Paper approved by A. Zanella, the Editor for Wireless Systems of the IEEE Communications Society. Manuscript received June 7, 2007; revised October 17, 2007 and February 11, 2008. The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 2C3, Canada (e-mail: mkhabbazian@gmail.com). This work was supported in part by a University of British Columbia graduate fellowship. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCOMM.2009.04.070075

0090-6778/09$25.00 c 2009 IEEE

KHABBAZIAN et al.: EXACT METHOD FOR THE ERROR PROBABILITY CALCULATION OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIGNAL CONSTELLATIONS

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O
h v1 sin 0 0
x sin

f x2 r2rdrd

u3

h u1

u2

Fig. 1.

Decomposing a tetrahedron to three bi-right-angled tetrahedra.

v2 h A

and comprise the whole polyhedron, the probability of correct detection is the sum of the probabilities that y falls in each tetrahedron. As shown in Figure 2, we can represent a tetrahedron using three vectors, h, v1 and v2 . Consider a triangle A B C such that A B ||AB, A C ||AC and B C ||BC where x||y represents x is parallel to y. Using polar coordinates, we can compute the integration of a function f (R) over triangle A B C as f ( x2 + r2 )rdrd |v1 |
0 0

v1 B
Fig. 2. Computing the integration of a function f (R) over a tetrahedron.

Let us represent Eq. (1) as p(R) = A exp BR2 where R = ||(y x)|| , A= 1 (2 2 )3/2 and B = 1 . 2 2 (4)

where

sin() , = x = x |h| sin( + ) = arccos v1 .(v1 v2 ) |v1 ||v1 v2 | v1 .v2 |v1 ||v2 | , ,

Replacing f (R) with p(R), we can simplify (2) as Ep (h, v1 , v2 )

|h| 0 0

= arccos

and x = OA . Therefore, the integration of f (R) over the bi-right-angled tetrahedron is

|h| 0 0

=
0

A exp B(x2 + r2 ) rdrddx

Ef (h, v1 , v2 ) =

f ( x2 + r2 )rdrddx,

(2)

For example, for f (R) = 1 we get Ef (h, v1 , v2 )

|h| 0 |h| 2

|h| A = exp(Bx2 ) 1 exp(B2 ) ddx 2B 0 0 erf( B(1 + 2 )|h|) A d , = erf( B|h|) 1+2 4B B 0 (5)

=
0

1 2

x |h|

|v1 |

sin() sin( + )

where the integration over r was performed using ddx

t

=
0 |h|

x x

2|h|2
2

|v1 |2 sin2 () |v1 |2 sin2 () ,

cos() cos( + ) sin() sin( + ) sin() sin()sin( + ) dx

dx

A exp Br2 rdr =

A (1 exp(Bt2 )). 2B

=
0

2|h|2

|h| 3

|v1 ||v2 | sin() 2

(3)

and erf(.) is the error function. As shown in Figure 1, a tetrahedron can be represented by the vectors u1 , u2 and u3 . Each tetrahedron is a composition of at most three bi-right-angled tetrahedra. Thus, the probability that the received point signal y falls in the tetrahedron is Tf (u1 , u2 , u3 ) = A1 Ef (h, u1 h, u2 h) + A2 Ef (h, u2 h, u3 h) + A3 Ef (h, u3 h, u1 h), (6)

which is equal to the volume of the tetrahedron. Note that in (3) we used the law of sines |v2 | = |v1 | sin() . sin( + )

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 57, NO. 4, APRIL 2009

TABLE I 3-D CONSTELLATION C1 x1 x2 x3 s1 1.414 0 0 s2 -0.471 1.333 0 s3 -0.472 -0.667 1.155 s4 -0.471 -0.667 -1.155

10

10

3ary transorthogonal C1 3ary orthogonal C2 6ary biorthogonal

Symbol error probability, SEP

10

TABLE II 3-D CONSTELLATION C2 x1 x2 x3 s1 1.703 0 0 s2 0.003 1.393 0 s3 -0.012 -0.665 1.217 s4 0.009 -0.735 -1.187 s5 -1.702 0.007 -0.031

10

10

10

where h = u1 + + (S.T)(u1 .T) |T|2 (u1 .S) |S|2 |T|2 (S.T)2 (S.T)(u1 .S) |S|2 (u1 .T) |S|2 |T|2 (S.T)2 and T = u3 u1 ,
10
1

10

S T,

5 10 Symbol energytonoise ratio in dB

15

Fig. 3. Average SEP versus symbol energy-to-noise ratio for some selected constellations.
10
0

S = u2 u1 and

C1 (3D) QPSK (2D)

Symbol error probability, SEP

Ai =

((uj h) (ui h)).h |(uj h) (ui h||h|

j = mod(i, 3) + 1.

10

Note that Ai {1, +1}. The exact SEP calculation of a signal point in an arbitrarily shaped 3-D constellation using (6) requires the evaluation of a single integral. For the sake of mathematical simplicity and quick estimation of the SEP of a given constellation, it is desirable to approximate the SEP expression using a simple equation. For complicated signal constellations, union bound can provide a simple representation for an upper bound of SEP. It can be easily shown that P SEP(x) kP
dmin(x) 1 ), 2 erfc( 2

10

10

10

10

5 10 Symbol energytonoise ratio in dB

15

(7)

dmin (x) is the minimum distance where P = between x and the other signal points, k < n is the number of signal points contributing in the Voronoi cell of x and erfc(.) is the complementary error function. From (7) it follows that the union or pairwise bounds can be good approximations if n or the number of edges of the Voronoi cell is small. III. N UMERICAL E XAMPLES For numerical examples, we consider two different 3-D signal constellations, namely C1 and C2. These 3-D constellations are designed using the algorithm presented in [4] and are reported to improve the minimum distance between the signal points. The constellation C1 has four signal points, s1 , s2 , s3 and s4 , whereas the constellation C2 has ve signal points, s1 , s2 , s3 , s4 and s5 . The co-ordinates of these two constellations are presented in Tables I and II, respectively. The average SEP versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) dened as the ratio of symbol energy to the noise power is plotted in Figure 3 for constellation C1. The SEPs for each symbol point in the constellation are obtained using our method proposed in Section II. Assuming that all the symbols in the constellations

Fig. 4. Average SEP versus symbol energy-to-noise ratio for C1 constellation and QPSK.

are equiprobable, we calculate the average SEP from the individual SEP. In our calculation, we assume a normalized value of noise power spectral density, N0 =1. Similarly, we have plotted the average SEP of constellation C2 in Figure 3. From this gure, we observe that as the value of SNR increases, the average SEP decreases, as expected for any constellation over AWGN. For a given SNR value, constellation C2 has a higher average SEP than does constellation C1. This is also expected because the minimum distances between the signal points for a constellation decreases as the number of signal points increases for a xed average symbol energy. SEP of three well-known 3-D signal constellations, namely, 3-ary orthogonal signalling, 6-ary biorthogonal signalling and 3-ary transorthogonal signalling are plotted in Figure 3. It is important to mention that decision boundaries for these constellations meet at right angles and that their SEP has been derived in [5]. Since different constellations have different number of signal points, performance comparison of different constellations is not straightforward. For example,

KHABBAZIAN et al.: EXACT METHOD FOR THE ERROR PROBABILITY CALCULATION OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIGNAL CONSTELLATIONS
0

925

10

Exact Simulation Union bound 10

1

C2

Symbol error probability, SEP

10

C1

10

10

bound we also compute the upper bound of average SEP for each 3-D constellation in Figure 5. This gure clearly shows that the SEP approximations for these selected constellations are quite close to their corresponding exact SEP curves. This is due to the relatively few number of points in these constellations. This close performance of union bound is in agreement with what we mentioned in Section II regarding the fact that the union bound can be a good approximation when there are a few number of signal points contributing to the Voronoi region. IV. C ONCLUSION The contribution of this letter is the computation of an exact error probability of 3-D signal constellations over AWGN channels. The originality of the proposed method is that it can be applied to any arbitrary 3-D constellation whose decision boundaries may not necessarily meet at right angles. Specically, we derived an error probability expression for 3D signal constellations in a simplied form which requires evaluation of a single integral of standard erf function. The analytical results were validated using computer simulations. Selected numerical results have shown that 3-D constellation (C1) has lower SEP than the 2-D QPSK constellation. R EFERENCES
[1] J. W. Craig, A new, simple and exact results for calculating the probability of error for two-dimensional signal constellations, in Proc. IEEE Military Commun. Conf. (MILCOM91), pp. 571-575, McLean, VA, Nov. 1991. [2] X. Dong, N. C. Beaulieu, and P. H. Wittke, Error probabilities of twodimensional M-ary signaling in fading, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 47, pp. 352-355, Mar. 1999. [3] X. Dong, N. C. Beaulieu, and P. H. Wittke, Signaling constellations for fading channels, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 47, pp. 703-714, May 1999. [4] J.-E. Porath and T. Aulin, Design of multidimensional signal constellations, IEE Proc. Commun., vol. 150, pp. 317-323, Oct. 2003. [5] X. Dong and N. C. Beaulieu, New analytical probability of error expressions for classes of orthogonal signals in Rayleigh fading, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 51, pp. 849-853, June 2003. [6] J. P. Proakis, Digital Communications, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, 1996. [7] M. de Berg, M. van Kreveld, M. Overmars, and O. Schwarzkopf, Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, 2nd ed. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2000.

10

10

5 10 Symbol energytonoise ratio in dB

15

Fig. 5. Union bound approximation and Monte Carlo simulation results for Constellations C1 and C2.

constellation 6-ary biorthogonal has higher transmission rate dened as the number of bits transmitted per symbol but it has the highest SEP as seen in Fig 3. However, from Figure 3 it is interesting to observe that C1 constellation, which has higher transmission rate, has lower SEP probability compared to the 3-ary orthogonal signalling at SNR value greater than 3dB. The SEP of 3-ary transorthogonal signalling has less SEP than other 3-D constellations considered in this paper. In Figure 4, we compare SEP performance of constellation C1 with the quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) constellation [6] which has the same transmission rate as the constellation C1. From this gure we observe that constellation C1 has lower SEP than that of the QPSK. This is expected as with three dimensional constellation the minimum distance between the symbols can be made larger than that of a two-dimensional one. In order to verify our proposed method for SEP calculation, computer simulations are performed. These simulation results are presented in Figure 5. From this gure we observe that the computer simulation results are in perfect agreement with the calculated values of the average SEP. Finally, using the union