Performance Analysis of a 64-QAM Rotated Constellation Subject to Rice Fading

Fading, caused by multipath in wireless communi- cation, can degrade the performance of a digital communication system. A few techniques have been proposed to improve that performance, including constellation rotation. The rotated cons- tellation is a technique that introduces redundancy through a careful choice of the reference constellation angle. This letter presents an evaluation of that technique considering the trans- mission over a Rician fading channel, which is flexible enough to represent different transmission environments (open, suburban, low-density urban, medium-density urban area). The optimum angle of rotation of a 64-QAM scheme was obtained for those environments.