QAM Constellation

Telecommunications Engineering

How It Works

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) conveys digital information by modulating both the amplitude and phase of two orthogonal carrier waves (In-phase I and Quadrature Q). In a 16-QAM scheme, the constellation diagram arranges sixteen distinct symbol states across a Cartesian grid, with each state representing a unique 4-bit binary codeword. The receiver demodulates the transmitted symbol by determining the minimum Euclidean distance between the received noisy signal vector and the reference constellation grid points.

Governing Equation
s(t) = I(t) · cos(2π f_c t) - Q(t) · sin(2π f_c t)   |   d_{min} = 2 · √(E_s / 10)   |   M = 16 (4 bits/sym)