Simplified and accurate BER analysis of magnitude modulated M-PSK signals

In this work, the authors consider phase shift keying (PSK)-type signals with very compacted spectrum and low envelope fluctuations obtained through the use of magnitude modulation (MM) techniques and stringent roll-off pulse shaping filtering. The analytical bit error rate (BER) of PSK-type signals combined with MM is assessed, for both flat fading and time-dispersive channel scenarios. The authors use a Gaussian model to approximate the statistical distribution of the distortion error introduced by MM to enable a closed-form evaluation of the BER. The proposed expression depends only on the constellation order and the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the MM factors' probability density function from the Gaussian one, and it was found to be very accurate.